SECOND OOPV, 
1699. 




LIBRARY OF CONGRESS. 




UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 



Hits and Misses 



Hits and Misses 

By / 

Charles Frederic Goss 

Author of "The Optimist," etc. 




Fleming H. Revell Company 

Chicago : New York : Toronto : 

Mdcccxcix 



THE LIBRARY 
OF C ONGR ESS 

WASHINGTON 



38148 

Copyrighted, 1899 
By Fleming H. Revell Company 




TABLE OF CONTENTS 



I 


Adam-Zad, or " The Truce of the Bear" 


1 1 


II 


The Most Common is the Most Sacred 


3 1 


III 


Laying a Modern Specter . 


53 


IV 


The Very First Thing 


75 


V 


The Discovery of God is the Clarifica- 
tion of the God Consciousness . 


93 


VI 


Hope, the Practical Equivalent of 
Knowledge . 


1 1 1 


VII 


Righteousness is Rightness . 


133 


VIII 


The Sacred Leaven of Sorrow 


155 


IX 


He Can Believe, Who Will Believe 


171 


X 


Temple-Building, a Universal Instinct . 


195 



Desiring that the kindest, the most appreciative, 
and the most faithful Congregation should be able to 
recall (if they ever cared to) some of the words ad- 
dressed them in the past year, I have selected these 
nine sermons for publication, and dedicate them in 
love to my dear friends of the Avondale Presbyterian 
Church. 

Charles Frederic Goss 

Cincinnati, May 24, i8qq. 



Adam-Zad, or "The Truce 
of the Bear" 



When he shows as seeking quarter, with paws like 

hands in prayer, 
That is the time of peril — the time of the Truce of 

the Bear. 



Over and over the story, ending as he began, 
There is no truce with Adam-Zad, the bear that looks 
like a man. 

— Rudyard Kipling. 



Glory to God in the highest, and on earth 
peace, good will toward men! — Luke ii, 14. 

No merely human mind has ever been able 
to foresee all the consequences of any single 
event. There is often a startling disproportion 
in the causes and results of human history. 
The mountain labors and brings forth a mouse, 
and the mouse, with his tiny teeth, liberates a 
lion or lets in a flood. Immensities dwindle to 
nothings, and nothings expand to immensi- 
ties. More often than otherwise, God is in the 
still, small voice rather than the earthquake, 
and the weak things are more likely to con- 
found the mighty than to be confounded by 
them. 

Nothing is more common or more trivial as a 
passing event, than the birth of a little child. 
Nothing is more helpless, nothing more insig- 
nificant than a newborn baby. One of them 
is ushered into being at every beat of the sec- 
ond hand of the clock, but it is hardly more 
than once in a century that one of them leaves 
more of a mark upon history than a vessel on 
an ocean. And yet that event which is so like- 



11 



Hits and Misses 



ly to be the most insignificant, is capable of be- 
coming the most stupendous. 

Nineteen hundred years ago a little child was 
born in Bethlehem and cradled in a manger. It 
was no stronger and, perhaps, no more beau- 
tiful than others, but that birth has proven to 
be the greatest event of time. That little, help- 
less child has been the pivot of human his- 
tory, and every century makes it plainer that 
the government of the world is soon to rest 
upon those then so tiny shoulders. 

On this anniversary of his birth, it is fitting 
that his followers should confess their faith 
in him and once more renew their allegiance. 
Here, then, in the presence of God, we pro- 
nounce our creed. We believe that Jesus Christ 
was Son of Man and Son of God — the Savior 
of the world. 

Among all the varied and significant events 
of that illustrious night in which the Savior 
of mankind was born, I select the proclama- 
tion of the angels (that his birth was the her- 
ald of peace to a world whose garments had 
been rolled in blood since time began) as fit- 
ting for this hour. 

A few months ago another event transpired, 
whose significance no prophet nor son of 
prophet can foresee. One of the most power- 
ful monarchs on the globe put forth a sum- 



Adam-Zad, or the Truce of the Bear 



mons to all the people of the world to unite 
in bringing about that universal peace which 
the birth of Jesus Christ had heralded. His 
proposals, stated briefly, are: i. That there 
should be declared a truce of God for five years. 
2. That during that period the governments 
should not increase their expenditures on arma- 
ments beyond the figure stated by them at the 
conference as the maximum of their need. 3. 
That some international agreement should (if 
disputes should arise between the signatories 
of this pact) bind them always to invite the 
mediation of neutral powers before appealing 
to the sword. 

No living man can tell whether this proposal 
is an empty whirlwind of subtle diplomacy or 
the still, small voice of God. Some have greeted 
it with derision and distrust; but for one — I 
have listened to it as to an oracle. I could no 
more suspect a man in the position of the Czar 
of trifling with so serious a matter before the 
whole human race, than before the eyes of the 
heart-searching God. If he is not in earnest, 
he is the most colossal fool, or the most despic- 
able villain the world has ever seen. 

Without the least pretense of being able to 
divine his motives, I claim the privilege of 
believing in the Czar's sincerity, and I sum- 
mon all trustful people, who put their confi- 
13 



Hits and Misses 



dence in the good of human nature and the 
power of the Prince of Peace, to give him their 
humble and their hearty aid. 

The possibility of the disarmament of na- 
tions, the destruction of militarism, and the 
coming of a bloodless era of good will, is 
worthy of our consideration. 

Let us thoughtfully balance over against 
each other, the reasons which experience has 
afforded for believing that war is to be the per- 
manent condition of human life, and that its 
ultimate condition may be one of peace. 

The arguments for supposing that men must 
fight as long as the race lives, are numerous and 
impressive. They are the minor chords in the 
sweet, sad music of humanity. 

There has never been a moment since his- 
tory preserved a record of events, when all the 
world has been at peace. The warriors are 
always on the stage. One struggle does not 
cease before another begins. The echoes of 
cannon and of musket, the moans of wounded 
and of dying are never absent from our ears. 
If what "has been" affords a clew to what 
"must be," it is as certain that we must fight, 
as that we must labor — to exist. No wonder 
that De Vogue exclaimed, "All experience and 
history teaches that war cannot be altogether 
suppressed so long as two men are left on 
14 



Adam-Zad, or the Truce of the Bear 

earth with a crust of bread, a piece of money 
and a woman — between them." 

Wars have been, in many instances at least, 
among the most beneficent influences in the 
progress of civilization. A hundred bloody and 
terrible conflicts could be selected which the 
blindest advocate of peace would not dare 
eliminate from history. Who would have the 
temerity to wish the American Revolution had 
never occurred? 

Say what we will, and stagger as we will, 
the conviction is forced upon us that in the 
rude and undeveloped periods, before men had 
begun to let the ape and tiger die, such cus- 
toms as idolatry, polygamy and slavery have 
been necessary phases of the great upward 
march of humanity. They have saved men 
from evils worse than themselves. And so has 
war. Without war (so far at least as we can 
see) tyranny would have been an eternal form 
of government, and injustice the eternal law of 
life. "War," said de Maistre, "is divine by 
virtue of its supernatural results." And no 
logic has yet been developed to prove that what 
has done so much good is necessarily wrong. 
"Until you can prove that a single blow in self- 
defense is wrong, you cannot prove that a com- 
pound blow in self-defense is wrong." 

Man is a fighting animal. There are explo- 



Hits and Misses 



sives in every subterranean chamber of his 
soul. A cannon asleep on a parapet may dream 
that it is a plowshare or a cradle — until the 
gunner pulls the lanyard. And a man dreams 
that he hates war until he smells powder or 
sees gore. In every drop of masculine blood 
the virus of battle boils. The love of the sword 
seems as ineradicable as that of the money bag. 
We are as keen to military glory as our fathers 
were. You who hate war, are thrilled by it as 
a harp string by a master's hand. Who shall 
deliver me from this inheritance of countless 
generations of Indian fighters and buccaneers 
and crusaders and marauders? "War and 
Niagara thunder to a music of their own," and 
our pulses thunder with them. 

The world is prepared for war and dream- 
ing of war to-day as never in its history. There 
was more and bloodier fighting in the days of 
Tamerlane and Genghis Khan, but those mon- 
sters would have turned pale at the sight of the 
armies and navies of modern Europe. War is 
in the air as well as in the blood. And sup- 
pose that the nations of the earth should de- 
cide to lay their armors of! and hang them in 
the banquet hall! How could it be done? 
What would become of these millions of sol- 
diers when they left their camps, and what 
would become of the peaceful workers whom 
16 



Adam-Zadj or the Truce of the Bear 



they would crowd from bench and loom and 
forge? Here is a political problem for the 
peace propagandist ! And if this problem 
would baffle the political economist, another 
would paralyze the statesman. There are cer- 
tain questions of government which nothing 
but war has ever been able to decide, and we 
tremble at the suspicion that there always will 
be, For one man who says, "the pen is might- 
ier than the sword," a hundred declare that 
what you write with the pen fades, but what 
you write with the sword stays. Down deep 
in the heart of every prince and every peasant, 
every soldier and every sage, lurks the belief 
or the suspicion that "might" of government 
is the only available standard of "right." Every 
nation is a fighting machine and the strongest 
wins and rules and lasts. It is a dread suspi- 
cion that questions are never settled until they 
are settled with a gun ! But it is hard to escape 
it, and the fear that arbitration is only a sub- 
terfuge for ^arbitration, and that under the 
mask of the statesman, you will always find a 
soldier — haunts and unsettles us as we try to 
dream of universal peace. 

So much, then, for the fears of the perpetuity 
of war. 

Now for the hopes of the downfall of mili- 



17 



Hits and Misses 



tarism. Are there any? Are there major 
chords, as well as minor ones? Let us listen. 

There is in the heart of humanity a grow- 
ing consciousness of the horror of war. The 
little rills of sympathy and pity are filling up 
a mighty reservoir. The love of battle is being 
counteracted by the hate of blood. The glory 
of war is being offset by its shame. The senti- 
ments with which men looked on the dead who 
covered the decks of the Spanish fleet at San- 
tiago are fifty per cent milder than those with 
which they regarded the corpses on the decks of 
the galleons at Salamis. When before, in the 
history of humanity, did the world ever hear 
an exclamation like that from the lips of Cap- 
tain Philip of the Texas, "Don't cheer, boys, 
the poor devils are dying!" At the rate at 
which this feeling of tenderness is growing, the 
day will come when it will be as impossible 
for man to contemplate a battlefield, as for old 
Telemachus to witness a gladiatorial combat in 
an arena. 

You have only to recall the cruelties which 
this sentiment has already abolished, to see its 
power. Study the pro jet of the Brussels con- 
ference and the convention of Geneva. The 
use of poison or of poisoned weapons, the 
treacherous murder of enemy subjects, the kill- 
ing of an unarmed enemy, the refusal to give 
18 



Adam-Zad, or the Truce of the Bear 

quarter, the causing of unnecessary suffering 
or destruction of property, the abuse of the 
flag of truce or of the wearers of the cross — 
all these have become impossible because the 
refined sensibilities of men cannot endure them. 
A Libby prison would be as inconceivable in 
a fin-de-siecle war, as another "murder of the 
innocents." Our victorious Nation has just 
revealed that it had no stomach even to take 
an "indemnity!" If this goes on we shall be- 
come as incapable of fighting as doves. Our 
battles will be as bloodless as Don Quixote's. 

There is a growing sense of the suicidal re- 
sults of the maintenance of enormous standing 
armies. It is becoming preposterous because 
impossible. "The great nations of Europe are 
dying of hunger so as to procure means of 
killing each other," exclaimed Frederic Passy, 
and Enrico Ferri declared that they will soon 
be unable to support the armor in which they 
are encasing themselves, for lack of adequate 
nutrition ! 

Into such a hideous contradiction and dilem- 
ma are the races permitting themselves to be 
forced ! It is necessary to strike with the sword 
to live, but it is impossible to nourish the arm 
because of the cost of the weapon ! The armor 
will have to support upon his feet, the starving 
and emaciated soldier whom it envelopes! 
19 



Hits and Misses 



Like Alice's cat, which became all smiles, so- 
ciety will become all army! 

Well, nature is automatic in her operations. 
She will cure militarism by poverty and hun- 
ger. A full stomach may mean an empty scab- 
bard, but an empty stomach will also mean a 
full scabbard ! It will some time be as neces- 
sary to disarm in order to exist, as it is now 
to arm in order to subsist. 

There is a growing intimacy and intricacy in 
the relationships sustained by the nations of 
the earth to each other, which constantly ren- 
ders war more difficult and dangerous. The 
consciousness of the solidarity of interests 
among them all is deepening, and a new sense 
of brotherhood is awakening in this conscious- 
ness. A few years ago China and India might 
have torn each other to pieces and the welfare 
of the world would have suffered scarcely more 
than when two thunder clouds met and burst. 
But to-day, so intimate is the relationship ex- 
isting between all lands, so inextricably are 
the commercial interests interwoven, that a war 
in any part of the world sends a shiver to 
every other. So delicate is the equilibrium of 
national forces that it is in a permanent state 
of instability, and a scrimmage on a frontier 
between two unknown tribes of savages is as 
dangerous to the political explosives in the 
20 



Adam-Zad, or the Truce of the Bear 

council chambers of the world, as the scratch- 
ing of a match or the blow of a hammer in a 
dynamite mill. 

There is a growing sensitiveness to the es- 
sential unreason of a chronic state of war. 
Men are becoming incapable of entertaining 
the idea of an eternal butchery and a perpetual 
militarism as a philosophic theory. The bare 
possibility that such a state can continue for- 
ever and be the normal condition of the life 
of rational beings, excites an increasing mental 
horror. The race would at length be driven to 
suicide by such philosophy. It is too horri- 
ble! The universal consciousness could not 
endure the strain of a conviction that a system 
of such bitterness and horror and devastation 
was the condition of existence ! 

But stronger than all, is that ever clarifying 
ideal of an ultimate millennium, in the soul of 
the universal humanity, which has been haunted 
by a dream of peace for many centuries. A 
true "city of God" swims before it. This vision 
never dies! And dreams, ideals and visions 
always conquer! As surely as matter must 
yield at last to the touch of spirit, destiny must 
be molded by the visions in the soul ! These 
visions are taking possession of new thousands 
of individuals every year and of new millions 
every century! No reasoning discourages it, 



Hits and Misses 



and no doubt represses it. It is a faith, an in- 
stinct in the soul, and it was implanted by its 
Creator. It is not to be distrusted because we 
cannot conceive it as accomplished. It is not 
to be distrusted because we cannot foresee the 
method of its attainment, nor conceive the con- 
trary of a condition of war. 

The savage Indians who were continually 
cutting each other's throats in the dim glades 
of our aboriginal forests could not have formed 
a mental concept of millions of people living 
together on their battlefields in perfect peace 
and quietness. And yet the advance from that 
condition of savage warfare to ours of civilized 
peace, was a thousand fold more difficult than 
will be the progress from the condition of the 
struggling nations of to-day to the period when 
war shall be known no more forever. 

The dream abides ! The vision beatific floats 
before the inner eye! 

And every century of progress brings it more 
within the range of comprehension, for more 
and more the ape and tiger are dying in us. It 
will be no harder for us to emancipate our- 
selves from war than from other mighty in- 
cubuses and nightmares of evil. Look at what 
civilization has outgrown! Do you imagine 
that when humanity lived in a state of polyg- 
amy or slavery or idolatry, it knew how it was 

22 



Adam-Zad, or the Truce of the Bear 

to secure its liberation ? It is within the mem- 
ory of most of us now present, that the concep- 
tion of the elimination of slavery from life 
seemed as impossible as the conception of the 
elimination of drunkenness or adultery. And 
yet it is gone! Gone like a mist, a cloud! 
Gone from America ! gone from Europe ! gone 
from Russia ! driven to the jungles of Africa, 
and, like some mythical hydra-headed monster, 
breathing its last gasps in the recesses of those 
impenetrable forests ! 

Nothing is to be conceived as impossible be- 
cause we cannot imagine how it is to be ac- 
complished. It is not necessary that we should 
conceive how these evils are to be removed. 
Their destruction is wrought by that omnipo- 
tent power that is working through our human 
nature as silently and irresistibly as through 
& atoms and rain drops and seeds. How easily 
the most stupendous miracles are wrought by 
omnipotence ! "How are we ever to rid our- 
selves of this fearful pall of ice and snow that 
wraps us in a winding sheet of death?" wail 
the rivers, lakes, and plains ! 

It is not necessary that they should know. 
God will solve their problems for them. With 
one warm kiss of light he sets them wholly 
free! 

And he performs his ministry of evolution 
2 3 



Hits and Misses 



into life, as easily as that of emancipation from 
death. 

"How are we ever to clothe our naked limbs 
with vernal robes, and decorate the floor on 
which we stand with flowers again?" — the 
forests moan, when wintry winds go howling 
through them. 

They cannot do it by themselves. But, with 
one slow tilt of the old earth on its axis, God 
turns its face a little more toward the sun. 
And lo, the sap asleep within the frozen ducts 
awakes and winds along its ways. On every 
limb and every branch ten thousand thousand 
buds appear, and swell and burst, and lo ! 

"Nature hangs her mantle green 
On every living blooming tree, 
And spreads her sheet, of daisies white, 
Out o'er the flowering lea." 

"Comes the spring, with all its splendor, 
All its buds and all its blossoms, 
All its flowers and leaves and grasses." 

"How am I to slough off my old vices?" 
cries humanity. God knows ! 

How am I to adorn myself with new vir- 
tues ? God knows ! How is the millennium to 
come? He can bring it. Some time he will 
give the old earth a quiet tilt up to the face of 
the Sun of Righteousness ! 

How little we know of the great subterra- 
nean movements of life ! A colony of ants in 
24 



Adam-Zadj or the Truce of the Bear 



the hold of a man-of-war knows as much about 
where it is going as we know which way this 
old sidereal system is traveling. And who of 
us all knows what the race is coming to or can 
measure its progress? I have a notion that 
these busy millions of men are running back 
and forth and in and out and round about upon 
a great, movable platform that slides along up- 
on its way, carrying them so silently with it 
that they are conscious of no motion but their 
own. For one, I believe in the platform and 
in the machinery that moves it ; but, more than 
all in Him who works the machinery. 

There is a higher power than ward politi- 
cians, or even senators and presidents and 
kings. I pin my faith to the Wonderful, the 
Councilor, the mighty God, the everlasting 
Father, the Prince of Peace. I believe in the 
song of the angels and in the Christ. I think 
the fires are now burning in the forges where 
the sword is to be beaten into the plowshare 
and the spear into the pruning hook. I see 
the kindling flames. I hear the first blows of 
the sledges, the clang, clang of the mighty ham- 
mers. 

I do not believe that we know how nor when, 
but I believe that it is our own duty to be 
men of peace. I am as sensitive to the fascina- 
tion of war as any poor, bedeviled human be- 
35 



Hits and Misses 



ing who is trying to emancipate himself from 
the brute and tiger; but I confess it with 
shame. It is the survival of the animal. It is 
my inheritance from the beast. 

But I at least love peace better than war. I 
prefer the spindle to the saber, ten thousand 
times. 

I will never vote for war until every other 
expedient has been exhausted. It is a last re- 
sort. It may be a necessity for centuries to 
come ; but I will never believe in it as the ul- 
timate condition of existence. I will write 
against it, speak against it, oppose it, smite it, 
fight it until I die. And when anywhere on 
earth, whether in a Quaker meeting house or 
on a Russian throne, a human voice is lifted 
on behalf of peace, I swear to lend my hand. 

Let us cherish the dream. Let us nourish 
the vision. We may not know how to realize 
it ; but if, as individuals, we are always ready 
to do our part, the race redemption will some 
time be accomplished. 

The movements of the great flocks of mi- 
gratory birds are not accomplished by a coun- 
cil and agreement, but each individual obeys 
an impulse of his own, and so the flight takes 
place. 

Let us see that our own individual hearts 
are ready, for we can never tell when God shall 
26 



Adam-Zad, or the Truce of the Bear 

give the word for the swarming millions to 
move up to a higher plane. And we shall go, 
not by council or agreement, but by moving 
individual units. 

And now, if you are ready, let us sign our 
names, to these cards, and send our blessing 
and the offer of our help to the mighty mon- 
arch who has conceived the colossal design of 
a universal disarmament. 



27 



The Most Common is the Most 
Sacred 



"Diving and finding no pearls in the sea, 
Blame not the ocean, the fault is in thee." 

"In every experience there is good. A geode is a 
rough stone on its exterior, but inside are beautiful 
crystals." 

"This I beheld, or dreamed it in a dream: 

There spread a cloud of dust along a plain; 

And underneath the cloud, or in it, raged 

A furious battle, and men yelled, and swords 

Shocked upon swords and shields. A prince's banner 

Wavered, then staggered backward, hemmed by foes. 

A craven hung along the battle's edge 

And thought — 'Had I a sword of keener steel — 

That blue blade that the King's son bears — but this 

Blunt thing!' He snapt and flung it from his hand, 

And, lowering, crept away and left the field. 

Then came the King's son, wounded, sore bestead 

And weaponless, and saw the broken sword, 

Hilt buried in the dry and trodden sand, 

And ran and snatched it, and with battle shout 

Lifted afresh, he hezved his enemy down 

And saved a great cause on that heroic day." 

— Edward Rowland Sill. 



What God hath cleansed, that call not thou 
common. — Acts x, 15. 

The Apostle Peter experienced through his 
contact with Jesus Christ, three sudden and 
wonderful awakenings. First, when it dawned 
upon him that he actually stood in the presence 
of the Son of God. 

Second, when he was struck as by lightning 
with the guilty consciousness of his depravity 
in his desertion of his Friend. 

Third, when in this bewildering vision upon 
the housetop, he learned that his whole con- 
ception of the vulgarity and badness of com- 
mon things, had been erected upon a stupid 
and radical misconception. 

As a matter of fact, all mental or spiritual 
enlargement is the resultant of a series of such 
rude awakenings — in each one of which the old 
foundations crumble, and the old horizons are 
violently thrust backward. These awakenings 
are always surprising, often painful, but in the 
long run are always redemptive and beatific. 

Without wasting our time in vain repetitions 
31 



Hits and Misses 



of a familiar narrative, let us seize upon the 
essential fact of this experience. 

The Apostle had yielded to the soporific in- 
fluence of a balmy breeze which blew across 
a Syrian housetop, and sunk into a slumber. 
He carried with him into the world of dreams 
an undisturbed assurance that certain kinds of 
food, and certain kinds of actions, and certain 
kinds of people were essentially common, vul- 
gar, and profane. He believed that they con- 
tained an indwelling element of evil which 
condemned them in its existence, and would 
contaminate him by their contact. 

Somehow and somewhere in that realm of 
slumber, the unreasonableness and the wicked- 
ness of this idea was flashed upon his con- 
sciousness, and he saw that evil did not dwell 
in things, but souls! 

(Life would be vastly easier, let me say by 
way of parenthesis, if the tatters of decayed 
and worn out vestments of thought could fall 
off quietly in our sleep, rather than be torn off 
like living flesh in our waking hours !) 

When Peter awoke (every enlightenment, 
remember, is an awakening) he was a differ- 
ent man. In that brief hour of dreams the 
cherished convictions of a lifetime had van- 
ished like a mist. That narrow and bigoted 
conception of the relations of the profane and 
32 



The Most Common is the Most Sacred 

the sacred which had clung to him even 
through his contact with the Christ fell away 
like the old skin of a snake in the springtime. 

It would be impossible to imagine a mental 
revolution more bewildering. He fell asleep a 
sectarian. He awoke a cosmopolitan. He was 
transformed from a bigot to a man almost in 
the twinkling of an eye. Deterioration of mind 
is always gradual, but recovery usually sudden. 

To the enlightened and astonished Apostle 
a whole realm of vulgar places, persons and 
things, were suddenly consecrated and 
shrouded in a halo of glory and beauty. God 
had made them holy! Who was he that he 
should call them profane ? 

His entire mental and moral attitude being 
thus reversed toward these articles of food and 
clothing, toward these places and people, he 
began to regard them with a new tenderness 
and sympathy — as Francis de Assissi did the 
birds and flowers after he had embraced the 
Christ, calling them, "our little brothers the 
birds and our little sisters the flowers." 

This change of mind and heart stands out 
before us to-day, my friends, as the permanent 
type of that transformation through which all 
men everywhere must pass, in proportion as the 
spirit of our Divine Master pervades and pos- 
sesses them. In a series of visions following 
33 



Hits and Misses 



each other like the panels of a panorama, God 
discloses to his true children — that there is 
something holy and adorable in the heart of all 
his works, no matter how deep it lies below 
the surface — and the rapidity with which we 
make these discoveries, measures our growth in 
at least one of the graces of Christ ! 

And we must not for a moment mistake the 
true nature of this change ! It does not lie in 
the object beheld, but in the mind of the be- 
holder ; not in the thing seen, but the eye see- 
ing. The alteration is so immense and start- 
ling at times, that it seems to us as if the whole 
visible universe had undergone some mighty 
transformation. But it is not so! 

A few days ago a lady who was seated upon 
her porch was horrified to see an electric car 
go crashing over a careless little poodle dog. 
Torn almost to pieces but not killed, the 
wretched victim crawled out from under this 
modern Juggernaut and dragged his bleeding 
and trembling body to her feet. His cries, his 
wounds, his mangled form excited in her sen- 
sitive nature an uncontrollable feeling of loath- 
ing and disgust. She rose and fled into the 
house; but in a moment more (impelled by 
that divine instinct of pity which God has 
planted so deeply in all good women's hearts), 
she opened the door, permitted the trembling 
34 



The Most Common is the Most Sacred 

creature to enter, took him into her hands, car- 
ried him to the kitchen, bathed him, bound up his 
gaping wounds, listened to his plaintive moans, 
permitted him to kiss her cheek, looked down 
into the eyes in which the fires of gratitude 
were fairly glowing, and finally — pressed him 
to her heart ! She did not see him as he really 
was, after that uprush of love from the sub- 
terranean chambers of her soul ! He was still 
a mangled and repulsive cur ; but now that she 
saw him through those other eyes, he had been 
transformed and glorified to her vision ! 

Such was the change that took place in Peter, 
and when he went down to the house of the de- 
spised Centurion (the hated Roman soldier, 
the uncircumcised Philistine), he saw him in 
a new and holy light. This abhorred man was 
still a Centurion, a soldier, a Philistine; but 
he did not seem so ! What Peter now saw 
was the divine spark that burns in every hu- 
man soul — the essential elements of his true 
humanity. He felt that he was every inch a 
man — and that he was also a son of the living 
God! 

It is of this phenomenon in the lives of the 
disciples of Jesus Christ that I would speak 
to you to-day. I wish to press down upon your 
hearts the truth that when we see life through 
Christ's eyes — common places, seasons, occupa- 
35 



Hits and Misses 



tions, persons, seem to undergo this curious 
and wonderful transfiguration. 

But I do not wish you for a single instant 
to misunderstand me. I am not about to de- 
clare that there is nothing evil in itself ! This 
insane delusion is too old and too palpable to 
entangle us in its meshes, let me hope ! There 
are thoughts of the human mind and states of 
the human soul, and deeds of the human hand, 
and words of the human lips, and glances of 
the human eye, that cannot be made holy by our 
thinking them to be so ! There are fixed limi- 
tations to the principle "Honi soit qui mal y 
pensel" There are some things which can no 
more be made good by thinking, than clay can 
be made soft by roasting! Covetousness, 
worldliness, hypocrisy, drunkenness, adultery, 
cannot be sanctified by thought, any more than 
the Devil can be by holy water ! 

No power in the universe can alter its com- 
plexion, or consecrate — a lie ! If all the angels 
in heaven should combine to manipulate it 
through some splendid ritual, and by the im- 
position of their holy hands or the total im- 
mersion of it in the waters of some sacred river 
attempt to turn it into a truth, they could not 
succeed ! It would still remain a lie, and hiss 
like a coal from the fires of hell when it touched 
the sacred stream ! And what the angels can- 
36 



The Most Common is the Most Sacred 

not do, we had better not attempt ! When men 
organize their business and when women con- 
stitute their societies in the hope that splendid 
buildings and gracious manners and elegant 
customs will make impurity clean, and vice vir- 
tuous, and falsehoods truthful, they are not 
only doomed to ignominious failure, but to 
some form of damnation that will disclose to 
them at last the real nature of unrighteousness. 

Christian philosophy does not veil the ele- 
ment of evil. Christian charity does not dis- 
guise the true nature of sin. It extends allow- 
ance to men, but not to falsehoods and crimes 
themselves. "It does not look with equal com- 
placency upon all men and things, and with a 
sort of animal sympathy lick every sore of 
humanity that lies at its gate !" 

You see that I do no t mean that a man can 
change a thing which is evil into one that is 
good, by changing its name or changing his 
thought about it — and now it is time to tell 
you more clearly what I do mean. 

The thing I mean is this — that in a thousand 
and one things and places and times and occu- 
pations and people which seem to us vulgar, 
common and unclean, there is something 
divinely beautiful, and that when our eyes are 
opened we shall see it as Peter did, in the food 



37 



Hits and Misses 



which he had abhorred and the people he had 
despised. 

Let us take these objects up and see if be- 
neath that thin veneer which lies roughly upon 
their surface, there is not to be found this un- 
derlying beauty. 

Take common places first. 

Those who live in localities which have never 
been made famous by great and glorious deeds 
and lives, are all but oblivious to anything di- 
vine about them ; but wonderful as it is that 
we can be so blind, it is a still more startling 
fact that those who live by the very tombs of 
the prophets become gradually insensible to 
that very element which attracts and fascinates 
the pilgrim ! It is only distance that lends en- 
chantment to our view ! A place to be sacred 
must be remote, and to be near is synonymous 
with being vulgar. It is only in some far away 
Palestine that God's glory has been revealed 
(we think), and we flatter ourselves that if 
we were there, that glory would flash resist- 
lessly and ceaselessly upon our view. 

It is a fatal heresy! The sacred presence 
does not abide in closets dedicated to prayer 
and temples set apart for worship alone. 

The nursery where we soothe a child to 
sleep, the kitchen, the blacksmith shop, the 
side hill farm, the dingy, dirty mill, the crowded 
38 



The Most Common is the Most Sacred 

store, the old familiar street, are all instinct 
with it, and if you do not see it there, you 
could not see it otherwhere ! You who cannot 
hear God's stately steppings in the thunder of 
traffic in the street, and in the dull rumble of 
the cars along the iron rails, would not have 
heard them in the footfalls of Jesus Christ 
along the shores of Galilee, for it is not in the 
sound, but in the ear, that sacredness exists! 
There is no spot on earth so plain, so dull, but 
it is drenched with this dew of sacredness. 
Every foot of earth is consecrated ground. 
The Son of Man would have felt the thrill of 
the divine presence on an Arabian desert as 
palpably as on the Milky Way! Every shrub 
is a flaming bush, every river a Jordan, every 
little quiet nook where flowers grow and 
grasses rustle in the breeze, a garden of Geth- 
semane to him whose soul has passed through 
the change that came to Peter. The most of 
us require an orchestra of sixty pieces to 
awaken our musical sensibilities; but hand a 
printed score to men like Seidl and Thomas, 
and those black (and to us illegible) ink marks 
will stir them to raptures and to tears ! 

There is no common place ! 

Take common times! 

How tame, how dull, how uneventful is the 
age in which we live! If this even tenor is 
39 



Hits and Misses 



disturbed by something startling, we soon elim- 
inate that unfamiliar element and reduce it 
all to the old dead level of monotony. And 
however strange it seems, we scarcely dream 
it may be sacred ! That element exists for us 
in other ages only. We put the golden age 
back into the past and the millennium forward 
into the future. The present is stupid, dull, 
profane. It never occurs to us that at any 
common hour of any common day, there might 
come to open eyes and ears disclosures of 
the divine presence that always haunts these 
scenes ! We think that they belong to the eras 
of the prophets, sages, seers and apostles — in 
the dim and distant past. 

We ought to understand, that the man who 
does not perceive the sacredness of life and 
the divinity of being in this noisy nineteenth 
century could not by any possibility have seen 
it in the first ! This was the truth that Ruskin 
spent his life in driving home. "If," said he, 
"we are to do anything great, good, awful, re- 
ligious, it must be got out of our own little 
island and out of this year 1846 — railroads and 
all! If a British painter (I say this in earnest 
seriousness) cannot make historical characters 
out of the House of Peers, he cannot paint his- 
tory, and if he cannot make a Madonna out of 



40 



The Most Common is the Most Sacred 



a British girl of the Nineteenth Century, he 
cannot paint them at all." 

Nor will the man who does not perceive this 
indwelling glory in every one of the six secular 
days of the week perceive it on the Holy Sab- 
bath. It is not the stillness in the village 
street, but the stillness in the schoolboy's soul 
that gives that holy calm to the world on every 
Sabbath day. A sacred day! A holy day! 
What day, what hour, what moment is not 
sacred ? What one not fitted for a revelation ? 
Is it that solemn period when the sun goes 
forth like a bridegroom from his chamber; 
when it hangs like the eye of God above the 
world at noon ; when the curtain falls at dewy 
eve and ushers in the solemn hush that ushers 
in the solemn night; when the imperishable 
stars look down from the vast depths of the 
infinite and whisper their incommunicable 
secrets ? 

There are no common times ! 

Take common occupations. 

We call them common, but they are not, for 
every one that is honest, received its consecra- 
tion on that morning when God sent man forth 
to earn his bread in the sweat of his brow! 
We speak of secular callings ! But there are 
none. The men who think them so, and yearn 
for that mental elevation which they dream of 
41 



Hits and Misses 



as inhering by some thaumaturgical efficacy in 
"the sacred callings," are deluded. 

"If I could only dwell among my books all 
through the week and on the Sabbath stand in 
the sacred desk and propound the results of 
my study to eager listeners ; if I could baptize 
little children, marry young lovers, distribute 
the communion bread and wine, kneel down by 
the side of the dying, speak words of consola- 
tion to the sorrowing; then, then, I could feel 
the thrill of the sacredness of life!" you say, 
but are mistaken. 

You would not feel the sacredness of my 
life, for example, if you do not of your own! 
There is nothing in the calling itself of the 
minister or priest to infuse these feelings 
into your soul. No one in all the world has 
ever regarded life as being so utterly and 
nauseatingly empty as those who in weary and 
soulless moments have discharged these sacred 
functions ! There come times to every minis- 
ter, priest, prophet, apostle when every word 
he utters rings hollowly, like sounding brass 
or tinkling cymbal, when his most solemn 
deeds are perfunctory and dead, when God is 
farther away than the polar star! Many a 
time, believe me, Jehovah seemed nearer to 
some humble worshipper that had brought to 
the altar a turtle dove and two young pigeons in 
42 



The Most Common is the Most Sacred 

some moment of aspiration or self-surrender, 
than to the poor High Priest who carried into 
the Holy of Holies an empty, a broken, or a 
sinful heart ! 

And the same sad truth sounds home in the 
heart of the poor drudge who digs in the sewer 
and dreams that if he could sit in the banker's 
chair or stand at the table of the scientist, he 
could perceive a sacredness in life which hides 
itself in the damp vapors which he breathes. 
His thought is false to history, to reason, to 
experience! Moses was feeding his flocks 
when he saw the burning bush. Saul was seek- 
ing his father's asses when the prophetic 
afflatus seized him. David was a fugitive, 
Amos a herdsman, Paul a tentmaker, and the 
Christ a carpenter. And yet through these 
dreary tasks, as through a lens of mighty 
power and crystal clearness, they beheld that 
halo of glory which hangs eternally over life. 

There are no common occupations. 

Take common people! 

We pass our lives, perhaps, among the poor, 
the ignorant, the depraved. Their low brows, 
their vulgar talk, their uncouth manners re- 
pel and offend us! They utter no senti- 
ments that give us elevated thoughts, they 
do no deeds that make us long to be heroes. 
We experience a disgust and loathing in their 
43 



Hits and Misses 



presence. We learn to despise our common 
humanity. If we could only associate with 
poets, with judges, with scientists, with women 
of culture and men of learning, we flatter our- 
selves that we should not only catch glimpses, 
but have visions of that divinity that dwells in 
man. 

We are mistaken ! If we do not discover it 
in roustabouts and draymen, we would not in 
savants and sages! Who do you think cher- 
ished the loftiest conceptions of human nature, 
Herod or John the Baptist, Dives or Lazarus, 
Pilate or Jesus Christ? The kings dwelt 
among those who wore purple and fine linen, 
and who fared sumptuously every day, who 
read books, fought battles, governed states; 
and the prophets associated with taxgatherers, 
fishermen, publicans, carpenters, criminals, and 
demoniacs, and yet they were the ones who saw 
the divine in the human. 

To the first, men were dogs ; to the second, 
the children of the living God ! "All men are 
liars," said Solomon from his throne, about 
princes and potentates. "Ye are my friends !" 
exclaimed a greater than Solomon from his 
couch by a low table in an upper room, about 
publicans and sinners. 

The "common people" ! Odious distinction ! 
There are no common people. The degrada- 
44 



The Most Common is the Most Sacred 

tion is in the eye of the beholder! Cornelius 
is one man to the soul of Peter the bigot at 
noon, and quite another to Peter the Christian 
at dusk. 

My friends, how is it with you? Is the sa- 
credness of life eluding you, or, rather, are you 
overlooking it? Is that holy something which 
inheres in all places, times, occupations, and 
people, invisible to you through your igno- 
rance, prej udice and sin ? Could I ask any bet- 
ter gift for you than that your eyes should be 
opened to all this grandeur, all this glory? Is 
it too much to say, "the multitudes are blind?" 
How tew are quick and keen to those tender, 
sacred elements which lie in every trivial inci- 
dent of life or object of the universe ! 

A few days ago a pale little lad, who was 
making a long and lonesome journey in a rail- 
road train, was noticed by a fellow traveler 
to be gazing wistfully toward a seat where a 
mother and a brood of children were merrily 
eating their lunch. The tears gathered in his 
eyes, though he bravely tried to suppress them, 
and all unconsciously he heaved a sigh. 

"Are you hungry, my little man?" said the 
observant traveler. 

"No, sir, I have a lunch of my own," he 
answered heavily. 



45 



Hits and Misses 



" What is the matter then ? Tell me and per- 
haps I can help you." 

"I am so lonely, and they seem so happy over 
there, and then they've got — they've got their 
mother." 

"And you have lost yours ?" 

"Yes, sir, and I am going to an uncle's whom 
I have never seen." 

"How are you finding your way to him 
alone?" 

"A kind lady, who paid my fare, tied this 
card around my neck. You may read it if 
you wish." 

The stranger did so, and these were the 
solemn and beautiful words : "And whosoever 
shall give to drink unto one of these little ones 
a cup of cold water only, in the name of a dis- 
ciple, verily I say unto you he shall in no wise 
lose his reward." 

He turned away to hide a tear, stepped 
across the aisle and whispered a few words to 
the mother of the children. 

She listened eagerly, rose impulsively from 
her seat, hurried toward the little orphan, and 
in a moment had folded him to her heart and 
was sobbing over him and murmuring broken 
words of love and tenderness. 

Now mark you, there was only one man in 
the whole car who penetrated into the holy 
4 6 



The Most Common is the Most Sacred 



secrets of the grief of this little waif. To all 
the rest of those absorbed or stupid people this 
deep and tender drama was passing unob- 
served. It escaped the eye of even this mother. 
And yet tragedies are transpiring all around 
us, in which lie the revelations of the deep and 
holy elements of our common human nature. 
We need the seeing eye, the hearing ear, the 
feeling heart. Do you not often catch brief 
and fugitive glimpses of this hidden sacredness 
in the faces of men, in the occupations of life, 
in the common scenes and places? I do. 1 
stood the other day in Burnet Woods and 
gazed at the summit of a hill along which stood 
a sentinel line of birches, the brown leaves still 
clinging scantily to their bared limbs in shreds 
and patches like the worn garments of half 
naked beggars. I had looked long at them 
in one of those fits of abstraction in which the 
soul seems unconsciously to be yearning for 
and searching after the secrets of the universe, 
and after that spiritual beauty which lurks in 
every landscape, when suddenly it flashed upon 
me for an instant and was gone. I cannot 
describe it. I could not recall it. It had van- 
ished utterly; but I know that I had seen it! 
My heart bounded, my bosom heaved, my eyes 
filled with tears. I had touched in some way 
the hem of the garment of the Divine Spirit of 
47 



Hits and Misses 



life. It was a mystery, but it was a reality, 
and I have perceived it often in places and 
times, and occupations, and people, but it flits 
as quickly as it appears. 

What I long for is the capacity to retain the 
vision. For the power to make the evanescent 
glimpse abide, to see at all times and in all 
places that sacred holy something which makes 
us feel that we are always in the presence of 
the Divine — this is the greatest gift or acquisi- 
tion of life. 

To him whose spirit possesses this power, 
each place on which he stands is holy ground, 
each hour through which he moves is holy 
time, each task which he performs is holy toil, 
each human form he sees, a temple of the living 
God. 

If this is alien to your thought, my friend, 
if it sounds unreal, if it awakens incredulity, it 
proves that your soul is still asleep. And if 
you desire to see more than you now see, and 
feel more than you now feel of this indwelling 
sacredness of life and being, look through the 
eyes of Jesus Christ. He is the great Seer! 
The interior natures of all things were open 
to his penetrating gaze. 

Suppose that in walking through the Louvre 
or Vatican you should come upon John Ruskin, 
or Burne Jones, or Millet, would you not ex- 
4 8 



The Most Common is the Most Sacred 

pect them to point you out a thousand hidden 
beauties on those walls? 

Suppose that with untrained eyes you were 
walking in a quarry or a canon and should meet 
Hugh Miller or Agassiz. Do you not realize 
that through their eyes would come to you 
revelations of the hidden teachings and secrets 
of those rocks that would widen your horizon 
and extend your vision indefinitely? 

Well, a greater than these is here! To his 
clarified vision the inner splendors were all re- 
vealed. There was nothing common in his 
sight. The rippling lakes, the running brooks, 
the sower casting his seed, the bird singing his 
matin song, the flower blooming in hidden 
dells, the mother nursing her child, the widow 
lamenting her son, the fisherman casting his 
net — in all and each, there was that supernal 
loveliness one glimpse of which transfigures us 
with joy. 

Look through those eyes ! 



49 



Laying a Modern Spect 



"The reward of one duty is the power to fulfil 
another." 

— George Eliot. 

"Man is only what he becomes — profound truth; 
but he becomes only what he is — truth still more pro- 
found/' 

— Amiel. 

"Make what contortions a man will, he can only 
bring to light his own individuality." 

— Goethe. 

"While the multitude imagines itself to live by its 
false science, it does really live by its true religion." 

— Matthew Arnold. 

"The great function of environment is not to mod- 
ify; but to sustain. . . . In the organism lies the prin- 
ciple of life." 

— Drummond. 



That ye may be blameless and harmless, the 
sons of God without rebuke in the midst of a 
crooked and perverse nation, among whom 
ye shine as lights in the world. — Phil, it, 15. 

We can put the whole thought of this text 
in a brief paraphrase. 

"My friends, you are in circumstances most 
unfavorable to the divine life. Nevertheless, 
I bid you attain it. Be greater than the influ- 
ences which surround you. The tide sets away 
from Christ and holiness. No matter ! Stem 
the current! Everywhere the minds of men 
are full of darkness. Well, all the same, let 
yours be light. Other men are bad — be thou 
good!" 

If St. Paul were speaking to a modern audi- 
ence, he would seize upon the word environ- 
ment. He would say, "Your environment is 
indeed unfavorable ; but you must be superior 
to it." 

This stern imperative of the great apostle 
raises the old, old question, Can a man be 
superior to his environment, or is he really its 
victim ? 

53 



Hits and Misses 



It is a question which no age can settle for 
the next, and no man settle for another. It is 
as fresh, terrible, and important for you and 
for me as if no one else had ever grappled 
with it. 

Let us take it up once more. 

Modern science has summoned from the 
"vasty deep" of thought two age-old spirits 
to which she has given the names of Heredity 
and Environment. These twin genii have 
wrapped their sinuous folds around men as the 
serpents did theirs around Laocoon and his 
sons. They have choked more aspirations and 
stifled more hopes than all the other foes which 
have attacked human happiness in the age in 
which we live. Everywhere men are excusing 
their weaknesses and failures by saying to 
themselves, "I have been born with inherited 
defects which I can no more overcome than I 
can change the color of my hair," or, "I am 
surrounded by influences which shape me in 
the same resistless way as climate does the form 
and color of flora or fauna." 

Now, all knowledge must be classified before 
it can be useful, and ideas themselves must sub- 
mit to be catalogued. Fear of them often van- 
ishes when they are discovered to be old foes in 
other feathers. 

It is somewhere recorded that a mischievous 
54 



Laying a Modern Specter 

medical student once beguiled a little newsboy 
into a doctor's office under pretense of wishing 
to buy a morning paper. While the young 
merchant stood gazing about the room, the 
young scholar touched a secret spring. A door 
flew open in the wall, and a human skeleton 
appeared. With a wild whoop of terror the 
child rushed out into the street, and reassured 
by sunlight and open space, stood cursing the 
building and its occupants. The commotion 
and the profanity aroused the old doctor. 
Emaciated and wan with a long life of cease- 
less toil, he rushed to the door and fiercely 
rebuked the profane swearer. 

"You can't fool me, even if you have got 
your clothes on," shrieked the boy, and ran. 

Well, Heredity and Environment have got 
on other clothes; but beneath this surface 
change you may recognize the Fate and Des- 
tiny of Antiquity; and for one I propose to 
stand my ground and face them ! Let us divide 
and conquer! We will take environment 
to-day. 

Is environment stronger than man, or can 
a man really be blameless in the midst of evil 
surroundings? Can he illuminate the moral 
darkness around him, or will it eventually ex- 
tinguish his light? 

I should not be here to-day if I did not be- 
55 



Hits and Misses 



lieve in the superiority of the soul to all its 
foes ; and yet a man who did not comprehend, 
or who should disparage the fearful power of 
environment upon all forms of life, would not 
deserve and could not gain your confidence. 
Modern science has given us too many clear 
and convincing proofs of its colossal power, to 
permit us to doubt. 

Schwankewitsch, a Russian scientist, having 
found that a certain Phyllopod Crustacean oc- 
curring in the salt vats of Southern Russia, 
when the brine was weakened, was trans- 
formed into a distinct species, began to freshen 
the water gradually. The change grew more 
and more marked, until after several genera- 
tions (not of thirty-three years; but of some 
thirty-three hours), the antennae had been so 
altered in form, a joint so completely lost from 
the abdomen, and other changes so great pro- 
duced, that it had not only passed from one 
species to another, but into an absolutely differ- 
ent genus! 

And this is only a single illustration from a 
single realm of being, of that terrific force with 
which environment is continually altering the 
forms of flowers, trees, fishes, birds, animals, 
and every living thing. 

Having seen this marvelous and universal 
process so thoroughly revealed, it is no wonder 
56 



Laying a Modern Specter 

that we "frail children of dust, and feeble as 
frail," should at last look up to the stars and 
out upon the sea, and contemplate a climate 
which we cannot change, and a geography 
which we cannot alter, and forces which grind 
over us like those of glaciers and tides ; and feel 
that we, too, are as helpless as the Phyllopod 
Crustaceans, and that whenever some gigantic 
hand freshens the water or salts it, our antennae 
will be changed, and we shall be shifted from 
species to species and genus to genus. 

Such a fear is natural. It is founded upon 
facts too palpable to be denied. Environment 
is a stupendous power. Let it be altered a 
little, and we shall be changed somewhat. Let 
it be altered completely, and we shall be 
changed altogether, or perhaps disappear en- 
tirely. 

But the consciouness of this truth has be- 
come too intense. It has assumed exaggerated 
proportions and importance. In reflecting 
upon the power of environment, we have for- 
gotten the power of soul! 

In reality, there are two forces which inter- 
act upon each other, and you cannot compre- 
hend the problem without understanding the 
values of x and y both. If x is environment 
and y soul, then let it be remembered that not 
only does x act upon y, but 3; acts upon x ! 
57 



Hits and Misses 



I bid you then remember that the soul is a 
force ! And it now becomes our duty to study 
by the strictest methods of inductive science the 
power of the soul to affect environment. Our 
investigation will be nothing but a review, and 
may be compressed into a single sentence. 
Soul, spirit, mentality, man (whatever be the 
name you call it by) has leveled mountains, 
drained marshes, split continents with canals, 
turned deserts into gardens, and gardens to 
deserts, denuded vast plateaus of their forests, 
shifted the beds of rivers, diminished or in- 
creased rainfalls, and transformed climates 
that were as hot as furnaces to those that were 
cool, and sweet, and tolerable. 

In short, the little Phyllopod in the tank has 
dictated the movements of the mighty hand 
that opened the sluiceway! "It is too fresh! 
It is too salt ! I will not have it," he cries, and 
the gates rise or fall at his bidding. And now 
I say, that if human pride needs to be humili- 
ated by the consciousness that it is subject to 
higher powers, human terror needs to be 
allayed by remembering that many of these 
higher powers are subject to human will. 

There are multitudes of individual units in 
every community who need to be told plainly 
and confidently that the environment before 
which they tremble is a bugaboo, and that they 
58 



Laying a Modern Specter 

must arise in the power of their free might to 
alter and to conquer it. 

I submit to the consideration of such people 
the three following propositions : 

Man's power to alter his environment is pro- 
portioned 

I. To the fullness of his self-consciousness. 

II. To the fullness of his self-confidence. 

III. To the fullness of his self-consecration. 
I. We are in the first place then to show that 

man's power to alter his environment is pro- 
portioned to his self-consciousness, and at the 
very outset, discover that only a small propor- 
tion of us ever attain to any considerable degree 
of that knowledge of ourselves which possesses 
this potency. 

Little children, for example, have no self- 
consciousness at all. They have not the remot- 
est conception that there is any distinction at 
all between themselves and the rest of the 
world. They know nothing whatever of an 
ego which is different from their environment. 
A rag doll knows as much difference between 
itself and its little two-year-old mistress as she 
does between herself and her mother! The 
nursing infant never in its thought separated 
itself from its mother's bosom, even when in 
act it did detach itself. Its entire relation to 
fhe outside world or its environment is gov- 
59 



Hits and Misses 

erned by a few primal instincts, and not by any 
self-conscious effort. 

Of course it is victimized! Fires burn it, 
doors pinch it, cats scratch it, dogs bite it. 
But slowly, painfully, certainly, this helpless 
creature does begin to detach itself in thought 
from its mother's breast, its father's hand, and 
all the multitudinous objects in the not me 
world. And just in proportion as it comes to 
know the ego as distinct from the non-ego, be- 
comes acquainted with its powers, and realizes 
its capacities, it begins to act back on that by 
which it is acted upon. It strikes, it bites, it 
pinches, it kicks ; and its environment begins to 
dodge ! It is because the savage is an uncon- 
scious child that he has affected his environ- 
ment so little. He has not in thought differ- 
entiated himself from his environment enough 
to react upon it profoundly. In a sense he is 
like the horse, the lion, or the ass. He moves 
amidst the forces and elements of his habitat, 
animated by a few primal instincts, and while 
struggling blindly against the most palpable of 
his foes, goes down a victim to those which are 
too subtle and elusive for his discovery. Of 
course he is their victim ! 

But with races as with men, power begins 
with self-discovery. "Gnothi seauton" is the 
trumpet call to victory. Whenever masses of 
60 



Laying a Modern Specter 

men have differentiated themselves from the 
outside world, and turned their powers of an- 
alysis and comprehension upon their own souls, 
its marvelous capacities have been revealed. It 
is like a boy's discovery that a knife will cut. 
They try the edge of this invincible weapon, 
the soul, upon every object within reach. In- 
stantly the foes of its welfare begin to go down 
before it, and vanish in proportion as that self- 
consciousness becomes acute and clear. 

Do you know yourself? Have you ever 
clearly and fully ascertained the indestructibil- 
ity of your soul, its complex powers, its sub- 
lime capacities ? Have you ever tested it to its 
utmost capacity, and found that nothing could 
conquer it? In no respect do you differ more 
from the mighty spirits who have defied the 
embattled hosts of poverty, sickness, misunder- 
standing, injustice, and misfortune than in not 
putting your soul to its full proof ! 

II. In the second place man's power to alter 
and to triumph over his environment is pro- 
portioned to his self-confidence. Self-confi- 
dence in its highest and truest form is the 
product of self-consciousness. It is only when 
a man has put his soul to the proof, as a soldier 
does a sword and a sailor does his ship, that he 
learns at length to trust it utterly. Men like 
Joshua, Daniel, Paul, Savonarola, John Knox, 

61 



Hits and Misses 



and Chinese Gordon, have possessed a con- 
fidence in their soul's ability to endure and 
triumph, that nothing could upset. As David 
trusted his sling, Robin Hood his bow, Caesar 
his Praetorian Guard, and Napoleon his star, 
they trusted in the invincibility and the inviola- 
bility of that ethereal essence which we call the 
soul. They felt that it could find its way out 
of any labyrinth, it could meet any emergen- 
cies, it could surmount all obstacles. Fire 
could not burn it, water could not drown it, 
death could not conquer it. Such was the con- 
fidence of Wyckliffe when he saw men kindle 
the fagots with their torches. Such was the 
confidence of Socrates when the jailer gave 
him the hemlock. 

"In what way will you have us bury you?" 
said Crito. "In any way you like; only you 
must get hold of me and be sure I do not walk 
away from you," he answered, with a calm, 
expectant smile. This faith that nothing can 
conquer the soul arouses a sublime confidence 
that the soul can conquer anything. "I am 
bigger than anything that can happen to me," 
said the hero of a Western story. 

Get this confidence, and mountains will crum- 
ble at your touch. What were Alps to men 
like Hannibal and Napoleon? What was an 
ocean to a man like Columbus? There is an 
62 



Laying a Modern Specter 

energy in a human will which has never been 
exhausted nor measured. You can measure 
steam by horse power, and electricity by 
volts ; but where is your unit by which to test 
what Alexander, Sherman or Dewey will do, 
when you put them in a pinch ? 

Do you believe this? Do you possess this 
sublime confidence in that vital spark of inex- 
tinguishable flame which burns in your bosom ? 

III. In the third place, man's power to alter 
and triumph over his environment is propor- 
tioned to his self-consecration. By self-conse- 
cration I mean the dedication of the soul to 
victory over all the foes that threaten its wel- 
fare. If self-knowledge is rare, and self-con- 
fidence rarer, self-consecration is rarest. How 
few men do we meet who have risen to this un- 
alterable devotion of themself to the triumph of 
mind over matter, of self over not-self ! And 
yet who expects to succeed without it? 

Let the idea once gain complete possession of 
a man that the development of his own nature 
— the supremacy of the soul over all its foes is 
possible, and let him give himself to this end as 
the vestal virgins gave their lives to the altar, 
and the young Hannibal gave his to vengeance, 
and nature will retreat and cower like a 
whipped dog. 

I do not mean, of course, that in the long 
63 



Hits and Misses 



run she will not wear out the engine which is 
the instrument of this spirit's earthly activities. 
I do not mean that she will not at last conquer 
the machine, but that she cannot crush the en- 
gineer. I affirm that the man is never con- 
quered until he surrenders. I declare that the 
soul is invincible as long as it retains its integ- 
rity, its nobility, its confidence. Even though 
it be at last fastened to the chariot wheels of 
Nature as kings were to those of the Csesars, 
it is still a king, if it walks erect! 

This is the real victory. 

The soul will attain more than this by such 
dedication. She will see obstacles vanish like 
mists. She will see environment made plastic 
to her touch, like clay in the hands of the pot- 
ter. But the thing which is inviolably certain 
is that even in her defeat she will be a victor, 
for she will demonstrate that nothing in her 
surroundings can extinguish the light, the joy, 
the hope, the confidence in herself. 

It was the glory of the Apostle Paul and of 
the founders of the Christian religion, that 
they made the development of the soul itself 
their one sublime aim. It was their doctrine 
that it could be superior to all that could hap- 
pen to it, and this doctrine they learned from 
their Master. Preserve the integrity of the 
soul, for where it is lost all is lost ; while it is 
6 4 



Laying a Modern Specter 

safe all is safe. Such was his view. Every- 
thing may escape you. Everything will escape 
you but your soul. But so long as you possess 
your soul you have all. What shall it profit 
if you gain the world and lose your soul? is a 
reversible interrogation. What shall it harm 
you if you lose the world and gain your soul ? 

Have you ever clearly perceived these 
truths ? Have you ever attained this utter con- 
secration of yourself to that victory which 
overcometh the world? I ask you, you who 
are discouraged and weak, you who are being 
driven along like chaff in the wind, you who 
are floating like a straw in a great river — do 
you think you would be thus driven and tossed 
if you should set your will as a sailor sets his 
rudder in a storm ? 

Is not the whole trouble with you right here ? 
Then begin at the point of failure. Dedi- 
cate yourself to victory. Be the master of 
your destiny. Determine to triumph over the 
environment that has thus made you its vic- 
tim. Match your soul against every foe. Try 
another fall with the enemies who have over- 
powered you. Determine that you will con- 
quer and you will! 

If you think yourself to be a shuttlecock 
between the battledoors of Fate, you will be. 
If you believe that "environment" can extin- 
65 



Hits and Misses 



guish your light, it will extinguish your light. 
But if you will begin now to believe in the 
superiority of spirit over matter, immortality 
over mortality, life over death, you will feel 
new springs of powers and resistance swell up 
from the depths of your beings like fountains 
in a desert. Dedicate yourself to victory over 
the world, the flesh, and the devil, and "neither 
death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, 
nor powers, nor things present, nor things to 
come, nor height, nor depth, nor any other 
creature, shall be able to separate you from the 
love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord." 

And now I ask you whether I have belittled 
the potent influences of environment un- 
duly? I have not meant to, for no one 
knows better than I by personal experience 
its fearful compulsive power. Who has not 
too often been its victim or its beneficiary 
to either disparage or ignore it? A few 
days ago, on my return from my class in 
the University, I walked through Burnett 
Woods. The rustle of the leaves under my 
feet, the dropping of the nuts, the chirping 
of the squirrels, and the odors of decaying 
vegetation transported me to the scenes of my 
boyhood. So powerful was the effect of that 
scene of almost transcendent beauty as to play 
my imagination false. Under its potent spell 
66 



Laying a Modern Specter 

I lost the senses of locality and of time. Once 
more I was a boy! The trees were those of 
the grand old forests around my native village. 
I was tiptoeing along a well-known rabbit track 
to open the traps I had set the night before. I 
was climbing the chestnut trees and shaking the 
nuts from the loosened burrs to the crowd of 
shouting youngsters beneath. I was watching 
the squirrels leap from limb to limb, I was gath- 
ering the yellow goldenrod and the scarlet 
sumach in the corners of the stake and rider 
fences. 

In this autumn atmosphere of fantasy, I 
strolled along until I came upon a party of 
children who were making the very welkin 
ring with their noisy shoutings. Their Sun- 
day-school teacher (like some divine Pandora, 
or a more heavenly Madonna) moved gently 
and benignantly among them. They romped, 
they laughed, they played, they shouted, they 
gathered the scarlet and golden leaves into 
baskets, or twined them into wreaths and 
crowns. The birds sang in the trees, the blue 
dome of heaven bent caressingly over us — life 
seemed a happy dream. My soul expanded, 
and my eyes suffused with tears. I said to 
myself, in half -articulated words, "In such a 
scene as this one could be always happy." 

Such is the influence of environment ! 
67 



Hits and Misses 



But shall I confess? 

Five minutes had not passed away, and I 
was still slowly moving amidst these beauteous 
holy influences, when I became suddenly and 
painfully conscious that my thoughts had 
slipped back into the old channel. The cares 
of life had once more rolled upon me. The 
imagination had ceased to act, and the mind 
was busy with the stern and pressing problems 
of the present hour. Environment had demon- 
strated its own incapacity by ceasing to buoy 
up the heavy heart upon its surface. With one 
dull plunge it had sunk down into the deeps. 

Truly, "the soul is its own place, and of a 
heaven can make a hell, or hell of heaven." A 
beautiful environment can no more make a 
base soul beautiful, unaided and alone, than it 
can make a beautiful soul base, without that 
soul's consent. 

With all my heart I believe in the beneficence 
of a good and the bane of a bad environment ; 
but it is because I believe in the power of the 
self-conscious soul to be superior to both, if it 
determines that it will, that I am here to-day. 

My friends, we, too, live in the midst of evil 
influences like those to whom the Apostle 
wrote. We pass the time of our sojourn 
amidst a crooked and perverse generation. 
But we, too, like them, may be here and now, 
68 



Laying a Modern Specter 

blameless and harmless, the sons of God with- 
out rebuke, and may shine as lights in this 
wicked world. 

But in order to do this, you must take these 
influences by the very throat. You cannot 
trifle with them. You cannot give them a 
single inch of rope. 

Everywhere you may hear that pitiful and 
pusillanimous wail that rises from the lips 
of weak-kneed and feeble-minded men and 
women : "It is impossible to resist the evil 
influences of business and society. The cur- 
rent is too strong. We must go with it. The 
most we can do is to utter a spiritual protest, 
to show that our souls are at least conscious of 
all the littleness and meanness of life." 

It is an awful age! The drift away from 
the old ideals is like that of an ocean current. 
Everywhere are Sabbath desecration, social 
gambling, social drinking, commercial dis- 
honor, easy morals, and easier marriage bonds, 
multitudes of our companions taking the color 
of their lives from their surroundings, as unre- 
sistingly and as indifferently as chameleons. 

But while we shrug our shoulders and ex- 
cuse our susceptibility to these influences, let 
us ask ourselves what the old Apostle Paul 
would have done in our places. Right well 
we know! The influences of this age, which 
69 



Hits and Misses 



have warped and twisted us all but out of shape, 
would have bent that lofty soul about as much 
as a poison-ivy plant the mighty oak round 
which it twines. These baneful habits would 
have affected him about as much as the shadow 
of a crow's wing falling on a rock. Recall 
his life. Revisit in your imagination the scenes 
through which he passed. Compare the influ- 
ences which surround you with those which 
entangled him in his journeys amidst the cities 
of the ancient world — the comparatively pure 
atmosphere which envelops the citizen of an 
average American town with those mephitic 
odors which men breathed in Ephesus and 
Corinth! But he came out of it all as Sha- 
drach, Meshach, and Abednego came out of the 
fires of the furnace. 

I think that in our best moments we are 
seized with a species of self-loathing and con- 
tempt for our own weakness. We, who know 
history, who know life, who know where all 
these streams of tendency lead at last, who 
know and yet who drift ! We who permit our- 
selves to be influenced, to be molded, to be 
corrupted by these crazy throngs who go to 
the shambles like silly sheep. And the piti- 
fullest thing about it is that there are so many 
people of mind, of heart, of soul, so superior 
to those who mold them thus. How con- 



70 



Laying a Modern Specter 

stantly and with what unutterable sadness 
do we see those who are naturally high-minded 
and noble-hearted giving in and giving up to 
people of base souls and debauched manners! 
Pitiful surrender ! Base contamination ! Un- 
holy perversion ! It is as if a lion should be 
persuaded to eat carrion by a jackal ! 

Now why, let me ask you, should we not 
mold such people instead of being molded by 
them? Is there nothing noble and inspiring in 
exerting the strongest influence? Have you 
never thrilled with the just pride of bowing 
the will and purpose of a base man to yours, or 
lifting him up in spite of himself when he tried 
to drag you down? Why not change your 
environment instead of being changed by it? 

Shame on us ! What we need is a Paul or 
two among us, to show us how a man can 
really be a master! I can almost hear the 
words which he would utter if he stood where 
we are standing now ! "Age of unreason, rest- 
lessness, senselessness, materialism, sensuality, 
you may roll over me like a flood, but you can- 
not budge me from my bed. You may grind 
over me like a glacier, but you cannot sweep 
me from my moorings. When you have gone 
past me I shall still be here, deeply anchored, 
firmly rooted, the same old Paul! There is 
but one true life, and I propose to live it. 

7i 



Hits and Misses 



There is but one divine ideal, and I am deter- 
mined to attain it. You can deride me, you 
can reject me, you can abuse me, you can 
impoverish me, you can crucify me again, if you 
want to, but change me you cannot! My heart 
is fixed ! To be pure, to be true, to be honest, 
to be a righteous man, to live for God as Jesus 
did, this is my fixed and unalterable determina- 
tion. Rocks shall fly from their firm base 
sooner than I. The mountain must come to 
Mahomet, for Mahomet will not go to the 
mountain." 

The world wants lighthouse men ! Be thou 
another Paul; or better yet, your own true 
self, redeemed, courageous, determined, conse- 
crated. Be a blameless man and harmless, a 
son of God without rebuke in the midst of a 
crooked and perverse generation, and shine like 
a beautiful and cheering light. 



72 



The Very First Thi 



"From this moment 
The very -firstlings of my heart shall be 
the -firstlings of my hand. And even now, 
To crown my thoughts with acts, be it 
Thought and done. 

— Shakespeare. 

"So great is the good I look for, that every hard- 
ship delights me." 

— St. Francis. 

"Here lies the body of Gen. Charles George Gordon 
who, everywhere and at all times, gave his strength 
to the weak, his substance to the poor, his sympathies 
to the suffering and his heart to God." 

— Epitaph. 

"Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy 
might : for there is no work nor device, nor knowl- 
edge, nor wisdom in the grave whither thou goest." 

— Ecclesiastes. 



"But seek ye -first the Kingdom of God" 
Matt, vi, 33. 

It is the first day of a new year. A thou- 
sand million men, women and little children 
have run another lap in the great life-race. 
Hundreds of thousands have fallen by the way, 
overcome by sickness or old age. Hundreds 
of thousands, issuing through the myste- 
rious gate into the great arena, have made their 
feeble start upon their little hands and knees. 
Some have gained crowns and scepters, some 
have been reduced to poverty or to beggary. 
The moans of the defeated mingle their minor 
chords with the glad songs of the victors ; and 
the panting procession pauses for a few mo- 
ments at one of the turns, to rest and to reflect. 

Multitudes have gathered on this holy morn, 
in houses set apart for prayer ; and to favored 
men has been given the opportunity — as to me 
— to speak to them words of warning or 
encouragement and hope. 

It is a solemn privilege and responsibility. 
It was upon some similar occasion that a great 
preacher exclaimed, "I have a half -hour to 
75 



Hits and Misses 



raise the dead ;" and the deep awe with which 
Whitefield always looked upon an audience of 
dying men led his biographer to say of him 
that on such occasions "he thought of nothing 
but the immortality and the misery of man." 

For myself, as I face this audience of men 
and women of education, of power, and of influ- 
ence, I feel like a warrior who for a few mo- 
ments has been permitted to smite with the 
sword of Scandenberg or David — an admiral 
who has a half -hour in which to touch all the 
springs and levers and lanyards on a battleship. 

I must not waste this precious time, and I 
have chosen for your meditation words than 
which there are no more momentous in the 
spoken or written language of man — the words 
of Jesus Christ, an utterance pregnant with des- 
tiny, weighty with command, appealing with 
irresistible authority to every conscience. My 
exposition of them may be weak, but they are 
strong; and as the beauty of the rainbow is 
not diminished by the poverty of the poet's 
verse, nor the force of gravity by the scientist's 
feeble description, so they will survive the fool- 
ishness of my preaching. 

"Seek ye first the Kingdom of God." 

There is a first love, a first purpose in every 
human heart. There is alwavs a taproot. No 
matter how many mouths the fountain has, the 
76 



The Very First Thing 

water enters through a single pipe. There is 
in your heart and mine an elemental, primary 
principle, passion, purpose, aspiration, which is 
what we really are. More and more we be- 
come what this first thing really is. No mat- 
ter how many other interests we have or desires 
we cherish, this thing, which is the core of our 
being, is our real selves. 

Some men are essentially idlers, shirks. 
They work, they toil, but it is because they 
must. Their one over-mastering passion is to 
evade toil, responsibility, care. They realize 
their heart's desire only when they crawl into 
their place of rest. They do not, like the lion, 
creep into their lair that they may rest to hunt 
again ; but hunt in order that they may crawl 
into their lair and rest again. 

Some men are epicures. 

Last Christmas day such a man, under the 
influence of one of those fleeting, superficial 
fancies which seize us all at times, gave to a 
bootblack what he thought to be a dime, and 
wished him well. Upon arriving at his home 
he discovered that he had mistaken it for a 
five-dollar gold piece. Early the next morn- 
ing he hurried to the barber-shop and found 
that the little boy had spent his gift for a suit of 
clothes. "It is not often a little fellow like 
me is so kindly treated, even on Christmas 
77 



Hits and Misses 



day," he said, smiling gratefully at his patron. 
But the epicure, writhing with the conflicting 
passions of generosity and selfishness, yielded 
to his evil nature, and insisted that the proprie- 
tor of the shop should give him back four 
dollars, and make the little bootblack "work 
it out with his brush" at the rate of two dollars 
a week. 

And yet that very man "thought nothing," 
said my informant, "of spending fifty cents for 
a piece of foreign cheese no bigger than three 
ringers." 

Any one who is familiar with the book of 
James knows where that man's God is. His 
primal instinct is self-love. His taproot runs 
down into his larder. Stomach is king. Thank 
God there are other kinds of people in the 
world ! 

The first passion of some men is the relief of 
sorrow. 

Down at the corner of Pearl and Third there 
is a cellar which is a sort of cul-de-sac — a 
dungeon with high walls and no staircase, 
accessible only by an elevator. A few days 
ago a little kitten, chased by a dog, came tear- 
ing down the pavement and plunged into it 
for a refuge. The employes in the store tried 
for five days to get it out before they succeeded, 
for it was terrified and hid in impenetrable 
78 



The Very First Thing 

corners. The next day after it had been liber- 
ated a schoolboy entered the store and asked 
what had become of the kitten. When he was 
told that she had been emancipated from her 
captivity he said, "I am glad, and I am sorry." 
" What do you know about it?" asked the clerk. 
"I have been dividing my dinner with it for 
five days," he said simply, and passed out. 

Let us put up a prayer to God that this 
first feeling of sympathy may never be second 
to any other in the heart of the little boy ! 

This feeling is not confined to the breasts of 
boys. An English sparrow had found an open 
place in a frozen gutter over on the top of a 
Mound street balcony one cold morning last 
week. He scarcely waited to dip in his little 
bill, throw back his little head, and slake the 
thirst in his little throat before he flew away 
and brought back five other little companions 
with him, more thirsty than himself. I have 
always loved these little wretches on the sly, 
and now I proclaim my admiration on the 
housetops ! 

Well, to go back, there is always a taproot, 
a core, a "first" thing in every heart ; and Jesus 
Christ says that in every true heart it will be a 
We for the Kingdom of God. 

According to my understanding of his 
thought the "Kingdom of God" possessed a 
79 



Hits and Misses 



double meaning to the mind of the Master. 
Sometimes it was an external Kingdom in the 
visible world, of which all men should ulti- 
mately be the happy and virtuous citizens. But 
sometimes it was an internal empire in the 
heart of the man himself, and I cannot doubt 
that in this sublime command he bade us make 
the establishment of both these kingdoms the 
fundamental passion of our hearts and lives. 

Let us consider the external kingdom first. 
I ask you whether down in the core of your 
hearts, its "coming" is your first and all-con- 
suming passion. It was Christ's. Follow His 
footsteps in a swift flight of memory through 
His earthly ministry, and see if it was not so. 
At almost every turn you come upon the revela- 
tion of a burning conception, of a world from 
which sin had been banished, and in which 
dwelt a humanity bound together in the invin- 
cible bonds of love. His eyes roamed outward 
from the little land of Palestine to the nations 
which "wandered as sheep without a shep- 
herd," and He yearned to gather them into a 
single fold. While other men were consumed 
by the desire to establish their private fortunes, 
His soul pondered the great world problems. 
Why are the nations at war? Why does not 
the broken family unite around the Father's 
hearthstone? "The field is the world," he 
80 



The Very First Thing 

cried. "And I," he exclaimed, "if I be lifted 
up, will draw all men unto me." "Go ye into 
all the world," he commanded, "and preach the 
gospel unto every creature." As Alexander 
sighed for an empire of blood and iron that 
should extend over the whole habitable globe, 
Jesus labored and wept and prayed for one of 
peace and love. For this dream He gave His 
life. He was a martyr of the Kingdom of God. 
He existed and he perished, to unite humanity 
in a sublime brotherhood. 

And every man who becomes his true disciple 
must be like him — the victim of an imperishable 
and consuming vision, the vision of a ransomed 
and regenerated race of men. 

In proportion to the vividness of that dream 
and the intensity of that passion, men become 
the followers of Christ. And how can men 
help cherishing it? It would seem as if the 
thought of humanity remaining in its present 
condition of antagonism and strife and bitter- 
ness and hatred would crush a heart of stone 
and melt a heart of iron. Can you endure to 
think of these countless nations of earth-like 
colossal cats in an indestructible bag, clawing 
and biting and tearing each other to pieces for 
centuries and centuries to come, as they have 
done in the past, without an emotion of horror ? 
If this is all there is to look forward to, if 
81 



Hits and Misses 

Nature in her blind birth throes can bring forth 
from the womb of time nothing better than 
this, then I say for one that I am ready to see 
a mill stone fastened to the neck of the bag and 
the whole accursed litter sunk in the depths of 
the sea. I do not think I could live, unless I 
believed in the final coming of the Kingdom 
and the King. I do believe in it! I believe 
the best is yet to be. The golden age is not in 
the past, but the future. The lion and the lamb 
are to lie down together, and a little child shall 
lead them. A "new world" swims before my 
raptured vision. Whoever dreams of it and 
labors for it is my brother — whether Plato in 
his "Republic," Augustine in his "City of God," 
Moore in his "Eutopia," or Milton in his "Para- 
dise Regained," or Bellamy in his "Looking 
Backward," or any wild-eyed victim of trades 
unionism or socialistic nightmares ! Let this 
hope lie in the core of his being, let this passion 
for a world-wide empire of fellowship and love 
be fundamental with him, and my heart and 
hand will leap to him in sympathy. Who 
would not labor for it? Who would not die 
for it? It must come, or the world will be 
transformed into a madhouse. Humanity is 
arriving at self-consciousness, and its sensitive 
spirit cannot forever endure this horrible dis- 
appointment and these frightful contradictions. 
82 " 



The Very First Thing 

This Kingdom is a spiritual necessity. Seek 
it first. Subordinate all else to its realization. 
This is the command of the Christ. 

B. In the second place there is a Kingdom of 
God to be erected in our own souls, and its 
establishment also was a primal passion of the 
Christ, and ought to be of ours. To preserve 
the beautiful harmony of all his faculties, the 
sublime equilibrium of all his feelings, to keep 
everything in perfect order and the white dove 
of peace continually hovering in the sacred, 
quiet atmosphere of his soul, such was the pas- 
sion of Jesus. For this he struggled in the 
wilderness, for this he shed those drops of 
bloody sweat in the Garden of Gethsemane. 

Is this true of you this New Year's Day ? It 
ought to be. So far as our personal selves are 
concerned, there is one paramount and primary 
duty. It is to be "perfect, even as our Father 
in Heaven is perfect." We must bring into a 
state of absolute harmony the discordant pow- 
ers of our soul. It is not difficult to see that 
the soul is like a delicate machine in its capacity 
for working smoothly and beautifully, when 
all is well. It may become like a fine chro- 
nometer in which no sound is heard but the 
delicate click of the escapement while every 
toothed wheel plays quietly upon its own pivot 
and into the cogs of its neighbor, or like a great 
83 



Hits and Misses 



Corliss engine, in which without a jar the 
mighty fly wheel revolves and the piston 
plunges, day after day and night after night, 
the incarnation of equilibrium and power. To 
bring the soul to this quiet and perfect poise 
and self-possession, to make the affections, the 
judgment and the will play into each other's 
hands with this noiseless precision, to make 
Conscience king over this now turbulent and 
anarchic realm is not only a possibility, but the 
primal duty of man. This has been the passion 
of other men beside the Christ. Listen for 
example to the mellifluous words of Milton: 
"As to other points, what God may have deter- 
mined for me I know not ; but this I know, that 
if he ever instilled an intense love of moral 
beauty into the breast of any man, he has in- 
stilled it into mine. Ceres, in the fable, pur- 
sued not her daughter with a greater keenness 
of inquiry, than I day and night the idea of 
perfection." 

Such is the first duty of man. 

Have you done it ? asks the dying voice of the 
Old Year. Will you do it ? says the New. 

I speak to a company of people, who have 
been more than ordinarily successful in solving 
the so-called "problem of life." You have at- 
tained a high degree of culture and wealth. 
You represent much of the best results of our 
8 4 



The Very First Thing 

modern life ; but I push the question of the two 
years home, and ask you to answer, whether 
this culture and prosperity have not served to 
blind you to a greater degree than you have 
thought, to these great primal duties. 

It has always been a terrible law of life, that 
when communities acquired a high degree of 
wealth and culture they began to devote them- 
selves to pleasure, and in doing so forgot per- 
fection. In the rough and arduous hours of 
struggle with obstacles, we retain by a sort of 
stern necessity a certain hardy virtue. But 
when we have attained the prize, decay sets in. 
It was not the rigors of the Alps, but the 
languors of Capua that sapped the courage and 
virtue of Hannibal's army. 

Upon the stupefied sense of every generation 
of successful men who have achieved wealth 
and devoted themselves to pleasure, the old 
Circean myth rises like an apparition. The 
hardy companions of Ulvsses, who had stood 
out against war and famine and flood, suc- 
cumbed to the food, the drink, the music of the 
luxurious queen. She touched them with her 
wand, and sent them to feed with swine. Their 
high manhood was debased. Their ambitions 
were quenched. Their hardy spirits were en- 
meshed in the thralls of mere brutality. To 
eat and sleep, such was the fate of those 
85 



Hits and Misses 



wretched devotees of pleasure. Such will be 
ours, if we have no higher aim than to eat, to 
drink, and to be merry. To-morrow we will 
die, or that which is best will die in us ! 

A few months ago a young lieutenant in the 
navy, whose whole life had been a long and 
arduous struggle with hardship, went down in 
the darkness of midnight with a handful of 
companions to perform a deed of daring which 
has set his name upon the same scroll as that of 
the Maccabees, the Gracchi, of Leonidas, and 
Bruce. While the waves rolled over him and 
the shot and shell hissed and burst above his 
head, he was a hero. But when he emerged 
from danger and obscurity to meet the bravos 
of men and the adoration of women, he fell. 
Like a doll baby, he suffered himself to* be 
petted and kissed, until his honored name has 
become a bye-word and reproach, and a dis- 
gusted nation is ready to implore the United 
States government to keep her young lieuten- 
ants under water, to pickle them in ocean brine, 
until their blood has turned to ice and their 
hearts to marble. 

Am I wrong in my suspicions that there are 
strong muscles that have been relaxed by lux- 
ury in this community ? Are there no victims 
of pleasure here? This deadly atmosphere 
asphyxiates its victims so sweetly and gently 
86 



The Very First Thing 

that they are unconscious often until it is too 
late. An environment like this is a dangerous 
if not a deadly one. We are moulded to it and 
take its style as chameleons take their color 
from the trees. Our hearts are like wax to 
this potent die of luxury. 

Occasionally we find a soul superior to its 
power. He opposes an invincible front to its 
solicitations. While he is in this world of ease 
and softness he is not of it. He seems to dwell 
remote like a star. He is solitary in a crowd. 
It does not concern him what others do' or 
think, he pursues his aim resistlessly onward 
and upward. 

"Had I melted into my surroundings instead 
of reading and writing continually, life had not 
been so dismal, but I lived among the stars an 
abstemious ghost/' said Joaquin Miller, writ- 
ing of a memorable period of trial and bitter- 
ness. 

"Melted into his surroundings !" Aye, there 
is the deadly method by which spiritual death 
comes to most of us. We melt into our sur- 
roundings, like tallow into a mould! What 
this world needs is more men who live among 
the stars — abstemious ghosts ! 

I am no ascetic ! I do not plead for poverty 
and self -crucifixion as good in themselves. 
They are no more good in themselves than 
87 



Hits and Misses 



wealth and luxury. And it would do no good 
to advocate them even if they were. Nothing 
is more certain than the acquisition of wealth. 
We are foreordained to luxury. Man, with his 
knowledge of nature and control over her re- 
sources, will sow this world chin deep in works 
of art and luxury before he is done. We must 
learn how to use and despise luxury at the same 
time, or we are doomed ! What I plead for is 
the spiritual imbuement which shall make men 
superior to their environment, and insensible 
to the deadly fumes of wealth and pleasure 
while they breath them. 

There is a life, a power, an imbuement like 
this. Let a man become consecrated to some 
noble endeavor, let there but come into his life 
a holy passion for perfection, let the Kingdom 
of God become his master, moving vision, and 
he is safe. At once he rises to the stars and 
dwells among them, and the earth worms, look- 
ing up from the deadly night shades and fumes 
midst which they crawl, see in him an "abste- 
mious ghost !" 

It is a race of such abstemious ghosts among 
the stars that these last years of the old century 
needs. If luxury and wealth are indeed to 
enervate men and take the soul and spirit out 
of them, I could be content, for one, to see the 



88 



The Very First Thing 

temples and palaces, the works of art and vertu 
erased from the earth like the figures of a dem- 
onstrated proposition from the blank face of a 
black-board. I should prefer to see humanity 
begin again that arduous search and struggle 
and endeavor which has formed our heroes and 
saints, and as it were created the soul. If I 
thought that my life in this beautiful parish, 
surrounded by friends, relieved of care, and 
supplied with the coveted goods of life, were 
relaxing my aspirations and clouding my spirit- 
ual vision, I have still strength left to wish that 
I might be thrust back by violence to those old 
days of my youth, when I "endured hardness" 
for Christ's sake, when I lived in a hemlock 
shanty, bought my daily bread with the penny 
contributions in a "hat," and helped lath and 
shingle the church, for which I begged the 
money almost on my knees. 

I wish you all a happy New Year. I wish 
you every good of life. But loving you pas- 
sionately as I do, I pray that God may withhold 
from you these treacherous gifts for which you 
are struggling, or withdraw those which you 
have already attained, if they hang like a veil 
before your spiritual eyes, and like a mill stone 
around your spiritual neck. 

If they obscure the vision of the Kingdom of 



89 



Hits and Misses 

our God on earth, if they choke out the desire 
for spiritual perfection, they are a curse and not 
a blessing. 

Seek first the Kingdom of God! First! 
First ! First ! 



go 



The Discovery of God is the Clari- 
fication of the God Consciousness 



"The universe is an ever fresh and new creation, 
a divine improvisation from the heart of God pro- 
ceeds." 

"It seems as if I could sit all day with the thought 
of God overflowing me as the pebbles lie bathed in the 
willow brook" 

"It is the glory of man that he is satisfied with no 
good below the highest — namely, God." 

— Hugo St. Victor. 

"May I say it? It is not hard to know God — pro- 
vided one will not force oneself to define him." 

— Joubert. 

Before an experiment in electricity, Professor 
Henry said: "Now be silent! I am going to ask 
God a question!" 

"Whom therefore ye ignorantly worship, Him de- 
clare I unto you." — St. Paul. 



"Canst thou by searching find out God? 
Canst thou find out the Almighty unto perfec- 
tion"? — Job xi, 7. 

Because we are mortal we must answer the 
second of these interrogations with a sad and 
humble "No." 

No, we cannot find out God to perfection. 
"It is as high as heaven, what can we do? 
Deeper than hell, what can we know ?" When 
the dew drop extinguishes the fires of the sun, 
when the ephemera comprehends eternity, 
when the firefly illuminates the forest, then, 
and not till then, shall mortal man exhaust the 
knowledge of the infinite God. 

But our answer to the first of these questions 
is a confident and unhesitating affirmation. 
We greet the sneer of the cynic and the wail of 
the skeptic, that "a finite being can know noth- 
ing of an infinite person," with the calm re- 
joinder, "a finite man knows something of an 
infinite universe, and why not of an infinite 
Being? But more than this. Man can find 
out God, for he has found out God ! The age- 
long search has really been successful ! 
93 



Hits and Misses 



This conviction is at least the faith of him 
who speaks to you to-day. And what greater 
service can we render to each other than to re- 
veal our faith ? Perhaps we cannot dem- 
onstrate; but we can testify. Each little bird 
may sing its matin song, each star may shed its 
ray of evening light, each flower disclose its 
hidden loveliness. And so each human heart 
may open to its fellows its own secret of happi- 
ness and hope. And this is the testimony of 
the heart of him who speaks to you. The 
search has been successful, the hidden God has 
been revealed. 

The discovery of God consists in the clarifica- 
tion of the impression which his presence in the 
universe has made upon the finite mind of man. 

There has been in the soul of humanity from 
the beginning of history at least, a "God con- 
cept." The origin and nature of that concept 
varying by the whole diameter between Poly- 
theism and Atheism, has been the never ceasing 
source of wonder and speculation. 

The inquiry into this mystery plunges us at 
once into the deepest problems of the soul! 
What is the origin of knowledge? How do 
any ideas at all awaken in the mind ? 

Some of them at least are vague and shadowy 
unrealities, caricatures and exaggerations of 
the objects in the external universe. They are 
94 



The Discovery of God 

figments of the mind, and haunt us in our sleep- 
ing or our waking hours as day dreams and 
nightmares. There is nothing in the objective 
world to which they really correspond. They 
have been compounded in the laboratory of 
thought from broken visions of realities, but 
are themselves unreal. They come and go. 
They flit and reappear. Is the conception of 
God like them ? Can any one believe that this 
idea which has haunted the minds of innumera- 
ble billions of men since the time when man's 
memory runneth not to the contrary, is the 
unsubstantial fabric of a dream, and not the 
reflection of some stupendous reality? Has it 
been any less tenacious than the concept of a 
material universe? And if this concept of a 
universe is the reflection of a reality, then why 
is not the concept of a God? What has 
sustained it in the mind, if reality has not ? If 
it is but a dream, why do not we awaken? 
Why does it not vanish ? Dreams are no more 
self-existent and indestructible, than soap bub- 
bles. When a soap bubble lasts forever, when 
a dream abides, then and not till then will I 
believe the concept of a God to be a mere 
hallucination of the mind. Bubbles burst, 
dreams vanish, man awakes ! 

A permanent concept must be the reflection 
of an abiding reality — as a permanent shadow 
95 



Hits and Misses 



must be cast by an abiding object. An in- 
destructible idea must rest upon an indestructi- 
ble foundation ! 

An ignorant old woman who had declared 
that the world retained its equilibrium by rest- 
ing on a great rock, was driven to desperation 
by a skeptic, who persistently asked her what 
that rock rested on, and that one, and that one, 
and that one? Rising in anger at last, she 
affirmed with flashing eye and clenched fist — 
that it was "rock all the way down !" And this 
is what, for one, I must believe about the idea 
of God! It rests upon a foundation that is 
rock all the way down ! It could not thus per- 
sist, unless it were perpetually excited by an 
imperishable reality. I cannot doubt, that just 
as we think there is an objective universe, be- 
cause of an objective universe which shines and 
blows and burns and thunders and impinges 
upon us, so we think there is a God, because 
there is a being who smites our conscience, fills 
our eyes with tears, and touches our human 
heart with love. 

And if it should be asked, "If this is so, why 
do we not all have the same idea of Him?" 
nothing is easier than to answer back, "Why 
do we not all have the same idea of this ma- 
terial universe?" No fact is more familiar 
than that our conceptions of this visible uni- 
96 



The Discovery of God 

verse vary almost as much even in this scien- 
tific age as do those of "the invisible" God! 

Does this universe, think you, seem the same 
to the Khamaskatcan, or the savage of the 
Congo, as it does to Herbert Spencer, or as it 
did to David or to Jesus Christ ? Our concep- 
tions of every object, even the most simple, 
differ as widely as our personalities, and none 
of them is correct until our critical faculties 
have been developed. 

The glory of man lies in his capacity of 
criticism. Slowly and painfully he eliminates 
the fictitious elements from the original and un- 
scientific conceptions, whether of the visible 
universe or the invisible God ; and the difficulty 
always is, not that he does not see both, but 
that he does not see either accurately. He 
does see both. The world concept is no more 
universal than the God concept. It is only 
more consciously so. And if it be still asserted 
that there are some minds in which the con- 
sciousness of God is not found, it must not be 
f orgotten that you can no more deny the exist- 
ence of water because a few wells are dry, or of 
atmosphere because you now and then find a 
pump from which the air has been exhausted, 
than you can deny the universality of the God 
consciousness because now and then you find 
an atheist. 

97 



Hits and Misses 



Yes, God impinges upon us, and therefore 
we are conscious of Him. We have an idea of 
God, only because there is a God to excite it. 
We could no more have an idea of God if there 
were no God, than of a universe if one did not 
exist. Even the hippogriffs and hobgoblins of 
our dreams are based upon realities. There 
could have been no hippogriff if there had not 
been a horse, an eagle, and a lion out of which 
to construct it. How then could there be an 
idea of God if (so to speak) there had not been 
some God "stuff" out of which to make it? 
Yes, we think there is a God, because there is 
a God. We have really discovered Him, and 
it remains for us only to clarify the conception 
which we now have. 

The thought to which I summon you this 
morning is this: The search for God, or 
rather the clarification of the vague conscious- 
ness of his divine presence in the universe, is 
the grandest achievement of history. 

The greatest glory of man must always be his 
ability to discover the unknown, and to compre- 
hend the uncompreh ended. If I were an artist 
and wished to represent the very essence of 
man's greatness, I would carve a human figure 
with two faces, one looking eagerly down into 
the earth and the other as eagerly up into the 
heavens, to discover the unknown. 

98 



The Discovery of God 

The search after truth, the discovery of the 
unknown facts of the universe, and the clari- 
fication of the crude conceptions of the mind, 
have been the eternal passion of the greatest of 
the sons of men. And in these explorations, 
what courage, what devotion, what self-sacri- 
fice have they shown! Will you have ex- 
amples? Take the search for the open Polar 
Sea. With what reckless abandon have the 
Franklins, the Kanes, the Pearys, the Greelys, 
the Nansens and the Andrees flung their lives 
away or placed them as a willing offering on 
the altar. 

Take the search for the other unknown 
regions of the earth. The names of countless 
heroes who lived before history, have been con- 
signed to oblivion; but the courage, the dar- 
ing, the self-immolation of the Hudsons, the 
Vasco de Gamas, the Ponce-de-Leons, the 
Cabots, and of the immortal Columbus have 
adorned the story of human life with a lustre 
which time can never dim. 

Take the search for all the other hidden 
secrets of the world. Begin with astronomy and 
reflect upon the passion with which men have 
spent their lives in all the centuries, gazing and 
gazing and gazing into the infinities above them 
until they have plundered their inmost myste- 
ries. Go on through geology, botany, chemis- 
99 



Hits and Misses 

try, biology, psychology, and all the splendid 
galaxy of the sciences, and everywhere you see 
a countless multitude of irrepressible, inde- 
fatigable, invincible men, peeping and prying 
into every corner of the tangible, or audible, or 
visible world. Nothing is more clear than the 
determination of these men to ransack the very 
universe itself. They will turn the world up- 
side down and inside out. Its secrets cannot 
hide forever from these prying eyes. The 
search is a desperate one. We must — we will 
know! To be frozen in icebergs, to be ship- 
wrecked on oceans, to be lost among moun- 
tains, to be engulfed in volcanoes — all these 
are nothing, if only we may drag the secrets 
of the universe out into the light. 

But you do not see the significance of all 
these sublime endeavors until you realize that 
consciously or unconsciously they have all been 
directed to a single end, and that end is the 
discovery of God, or the clarification of the 
imperfect concept of Him. For this is, after 
all, the master secret. If we can find Him, we 
have found all. Not every investigator has 
realized this fact, or consciously pursued this 
end. Nor, when a vessel is plowing its way 
across the sea, are all the members of its crew 
consciously seeking the harbor. It is only the 
captain and the mate perhaps who never lose 

IOO 



The Discovery of God 

sight of that single aim. And yet the entire 
crew, from the stokers who feed the furnace 
and the engineers who hold the lever, to the 
cook in the kitchen and the middy on the yard 
arm, are working for it as ardently as they. 

And, to my mind, the multitudinous efforts 
of all these individual explorers who are inde- 
pendently (many of them selfishly or aimlessly) 
hunting for these mysterious secrets, become 
intelligible and sacred only because they are 
bearing upon a single point, and can have but 
a single result — the discovery of God. Their 
scattered rays are being slowly focussed as in 
a mighty lens upon a single mystery — the 
nature of the divine Being. 

Looked at from this point of view all be- 
comes comprehensible, and the sublimity of 
the scattered and divided efforts is seen. 

The figures of the great leaders in this 
search (attended by their innumerable com- 
panions) rise before our enraptured vision. 
Buddha meditating upon His being beneath 
the sacred trees in India, Abraham setting his 
face westward to find His person near the sink- 
ing sun, Moses wandering among the moun- 
tains and beholding His Majesty in burning 
bushes, David, Elija, Isaiah, pursuing the ever- 
present, ever-receding vision; Socrates and 
Plato, Cicero and Marcus Aurelius gazing into 

IOI 



Hits and Misses 



the profound depths of the human spirit, and, 
at last, the humble Carpenter of Nazareth, his 
eye purged like that of the eagle, beholding 
Him with undimmed and unclouded vision in 
every lily that bloomed and every bird that 
sung and every little child that looked trust- 
fully up into his face. 

Sometimes it has fared hard with this sub- 
lime discovery — this ever-clarifying concept. 
There have been ages when it has been eclipsed 
and ages in which it was almost lost. Atheism 
has abolished it; dualism has divided it; 
pantheism has enveloped it in fogs ; polytheism 
has trampled it under its swine-like feet, and 
agnosticism (last and deadliest of all its foes) 
has dismissed it with its calm, superior smile. 

But still the idea abides. Still the vision 
endures. Still human hearts are true to it, 
and would even dare to die for it, while every 
year its imperfections are eliminated and hu- 
manity gains a truer knowledge of its God. 
Once, I have said, it existed in complete perfec- 
tion in the soul of the divine man. His mind 
contained it, as the drop of dew contains the 
sun. It was a perfect reflection, in the pure 
depths of that beautiful, undistorted spirit. 

And we may correct our own distorted vis- 
ion by that of Christ's. His conception has 
become the standard of the world. The eye 
1 02 



The Discovery of God 

which cannot gaze at the Sun itself without 
being blinded, gazes freely at its reflection in 
the drop of dew. We see our God in Christ. 

Once more we listen to the old interrogation 
uttered in the minor tone of sadness, "Canst 
thou by searching find out God ?" And listen- 
ing here this holy Sabbath morn we catch the 
joyous answer rolling round the world: We 
can! — we have! God is a spirit, infinite, eter- 
nal and unchangeable in His being, wisdom, 
power, holiness, justice, goodness and truth. 
He is our Father. The age-long efforts of the 
myriads of men who have looked and listened 
have been successful. Man has formed a true 
concept (true as far as it goes) of the universe 
in which he lives, and true as far as it goes of 
the spirit who created it. Alleluja! Amen! 
We cannot find him out to perfection ; but the 
vision which we have caught from Jesus Christ 
is genuine. It is correct in outline. It is in- 
complete, but it is not untrue. 

There is a certain solemnity in this thought. 
It fills the mind with awe to think that starting 
in absolute ignorance (like that of a new-born 
infant) of this infinite universe, humanity by 
the aid of its prophets, its sages, and its divine 
Teacher, have risen to these august conceptions. 

What a treasure is this gift which humanity 
lays at our feet this morning. Here, in this 
103 



Hits and Misses 



"gospel" conception of a loving heavenly 
Father, is the result of the toil and sacri- 
fice of billions of lives. Suppose that these 
results should be obliterated, and we had 
to begin again! Suppose that you had noth- 
ing of the fruits of all this search of an- 
guished, eager hearts to help you on your 
painful way, and that we had to start de novo 
with that first vague consciousness which 
stirred in the bosom of those primitive savages 
who wakened slowly from animalism to hu- 
manity as they looked up from the earth be- 
neath their feet to the stars above their heads. 

And what is your spiritual attitude, my 
friend, toward this idea of God which has been 
thus distilled from the prayers, the sighs, the 
tears and raptures of the ages ? Have you re- 
ceived it? Have you appropriated it? Does 
the beatific vision float before your inward eye ? 
Or have you spurned the gift divine? 

To me there is no defect in the soul more 
radical and more despicable than ingratitude 
and contempt for the efforts of those who have 
gone before us, to solve the problems and re- 
move the obstacles of life. The fruits of these 
ages of labor and devotion possess to my mind 
an indescribable sacredness. We ought never 
to forget that all the treasures of the modern 
world are the products of the consolidated 
104 



The Discovery of God 

efforts of the entire human race, the countless 
myriads of men and women who have struggled 
with the forces of nature and the foes of ex- 
istence. He who rejects or despises these gifts 
seems to me to be guilty of a certain sacrilege. 

But no one despises and rejects the fruits of 
these labors in the world of useful inventions. 
With what eagerness you appropriate the en- 
gines, instruments and mechanisms which these 
myriads of inventors have perfected for your 
use. 

It is so in the world of art. The products of 
their struggles to conceive and materialize "the 
beautiful" possess a sacredness which every 
thoughtful mind respects. The paintings, the 
statues, the palaces, the cathedrals which have 
been slowly and painfully evolved out of all 
these age-long yearnings and strivings of the 
ceaseless generations of men, awaken within 
our bosoms both wonder and gratitude. 

It is so in the domain of literature. The 
great books of the ages are the hives in which 
the honeyed thought of billions of men are 
stored ! It takes whole beds of roses to make 
a single drop of attar, whole groves of cinchona 
leaves to make a vial of quinine, whole fields of 
clover to make a cup of honey, and whole gen- 
erations of men to make a Kalavalla, Niebel- 
ungenlied, Iliad, Paradise Lost, Inferno. These 
105 



Hits and Misses 



books — the sacred vials which contain these 
precious distillations — we preserve as we pre- 
serve the apples of our eyes. 

It is so with the great ethical ideas, and the 
great social conceptions of the race. What 
multitudes on multitudes of suffering, strug- 
gling men gave up their lives to work out their 
problems. And liberty, for example, sacred 
in itself, becomes holier a thousand times be- 
cause of the martyrs and heroes, the good, the 
great, the generous, the true, who gave their 
lives to demonstrate and secure f or us this holy 
gift. 

And now, it seems to me, the Christian con- 
ception of God, the conception as it exists, not 
in the minds of zealots and bigots, but in the 
minds and books of the greatest, noblest advo- 
cates, is the most sacred drop of knowledge that 
has been distilled from all the ages. Every 
race that has ever lived, every great thinker 
that has ever pondered on the secrets of life, 
has contributed something, perhaps, to the sub- 
lime conception of God. 

For one, I could no more repudiate it than 
I could repudiate the government established 
by my fathers, or the conception of the universe 
elaborated by the sages. Nay, I could let all 
these and others go, before I could part with it. 
I cling to it. I adore it. I place it above all 
1 06 



The Discovery of God 



price. It is the pearl for which I would 
barter every other treasure. Deprive me of 
this, and I have nothing ; leave it with me, and 
I have all. 

Let us cherish it in our heart of hearts. Per- 
haps in that sacred repository, where it has 
been purified by being brooded over, it will 
undergo still further clarification, and we shall 
be able to transmit to> those who follow us 
amidst the mysteries of life a God-concept 
still more sublime and clear than we ourselves 
received from those who preceded us. 



107 



Hope, the Practical Equivalent of 
Knowledge 



'The wish, that of the living whole 
No life may fail beyond the grave — 
Derives it not from what we have 

The likest God within the soul? 

'Are God and Nature then at strife, 
That Nature lends such evil dreams! 
So careful of the type she seems 

So careless of the single life; 

'That I, considering everywhere 
Her secret meaning in her deeds, 
And finding that of fifty seeds 

She often brings but one to bear, 

'I falter where I firmly trod 

And falling with my weight of cares 
Upon the great world's altar stairs 

That slope through darkness up to God, 

'I stretch lame hands of faith, and grope 
And gather dust and chaff, and call 
To what I feel is Lord of All, 

And faintly trust the larger hope. 3 ' 

— In Memoriam — LIV. 



Hope thou in God. — Ps. xlii, 11. 



There are seven states of mind so closely 
juxtaposed that they may not inappropriately 
be called the gamut of the soul, or perhaps its 
"scala sancta," its holy staircase. They are: 
Knowledge, belief, faith, hope, doubt, disbe- 
lief, despair. 

Beginning at the highest step of this sacred 
stairway, it is possible to descend into deepest 
hell. Beginning at the lowest, to ascend into 
highest heaven. 

Knowledge is the clear and certain appre- 
hension of truth ; the restful assurance arising 
from proper evidence that a mental impression 
agrees with the reality of an object. 

Belief is the acceptance of anything on 
grounds which, while they render it probable, 
do not compel its admission. 

Faith, in the sense now meant, is the assent 
of the mind to the testimony of God's chosen 
witnesses of truth, to the facts of the spiritual 
realm of being. 

Hope is desire accompanied by expectation, 
in 



Hits and Misses 

the confidence that the thing looked forward to 
will happen. 

Doubt is the indecision of the mind between 
views which are, or seem to be, contradictory. 

Disbelief is a positive and clear conviction 
that a statement does not correspond with a 
fact. 

Despair is the darkness and bitterness which 
overwhelms the mind when all hope and faith 
have disappeared. 

You will observe that hope stands in the mid- 
dle of this gamut, of this scala sancta. Below 
it are doubt, disbelief, despair ; above it, faith, 
belief, knowledge. Hope is thus a sort of pivot 
of the soul's life. Upon hope as upon a wide 
platform in this stairway, I believe that any 
man, whatever his spiritual difficulties, may 
pause in his swift descent toward darkness and 
begin his upward climb toward light, and I 
ask you to consider the reasonableness of this 
assertion. 

What is it that makes life hard and unsatis- 
factory to people of spiritual natures and noble 
aspirations? I answer, "uncertainty as to the 
being and nature of God." If such people 
could absolutely know that God lives and loves, 
or even if they could believe it, or even if they 
had faith in it, they could bear the disappoint- 
ments and endure the trials of life with forti- 



Hope, the Equivalent of Knowledge 

tude. Absolute and verifiable knowledge of 
the being and nature of God would simply 
revolutionize life. If, to-morrow morning, a 
new faculty could be developed in the mind, 
or a new organ in the body, by which we should 
gain as clear a knowledge of God as we ha,ye 
of the sun, the metamorphosis of all institutions 
and characters would be catastrophic. Even if 
we could only have belief instead of knowledge, 
or faith instead of belief, the transformation 
would be stupendous and immeasurable. 

But widespread as the belief in God has been, 
it has lacked that definiteness and assurance 
that could work these catastrophic changes, and 
in our day multitudes of people have ceased to 
possess any kind of assurance whatever as to 
his existence or character. Just as the frost 
has been pulled out of snow by a summer sun, 
just as fragrance has been extracted from fad- 
ing flowers by decay, confidence, trust, assur- 
ances of God have been dissolved in the hearts 
of multitudes of our fellow men by the dis- 
coveries and the speculations of modern science 
and of modern criticism. 

Now, what message has the Christian min- 
istry for these people? They constitute an 
enormous and increasing class, and if we have 
no word of comfort or enlightenment for them, 



"3 



Hits and Misses 



we might almost as well cease to proclaim our 
call to preach a "universal" gospel. 

For one, I believe I have a message for 
them. It is an old tradition that a bullet 
dipped in the blood of the hunter never misses 
its mark. Well, this message has been dipped 
in mine. I know such people's needs because 
I have suffered them. I feel toward them like 
the Ancient Mariner — 

The moment that his face I see, 
I know the man that must hear me ! 

This is my message: If you cannot have 
knowledge of God, if you cannot secure belief, 
if you cannot exercise faith, you can accomplish 
the main end by hope! Any man can hope. 
Hope thou in God ! I say that any man can 
hope in God, and this proposition is so sweep- 
ing and so important that we must bend the 
whole force of our critical analysis upon it. 

What is hope? Hope is that faculty or 
capacity of the soul by which it believes in the 
existence of what it thinks ought to be, and 
expects what it considers desirable. Hope is 
an original element in the mind of man. It is 
a basal quality of spirit. It is as much an 
instinct as the love of life. Hope is as much 
a mode of soul as heat is a mode of motion. 
It is a power without which existence would 
become unendurable, and so impossible. The 
114 



Hope, the Equivalent of Knowledge 

value of this function of the soul in life trans- 
cends the possibility of exaggeration. Its mis- 
sion is as much underestimated as its possibili- 
ties are unrealized. 

I have said that hope was instinctive; and 
the significance of this fact must be brought to 
light. I mean that it is natural for man to 
hope. Hope springs out of the soul just as 
water springs out of a fountain, or light out 
of a candle, or perfume out of a flower. It is 
not the result of experience. It is not depend- 
ant upon proof or even probability. It pos- 
sesses the power of spontaneous origination. It 
is self-animated. It is self-sustained. It can 
be developed, but it cannot be created. Little 
children do not have to be taught to hope, any 
more than they have to be taught to drink their 
mothers' milk or breathe the air of heaven. 
They hope because they cannot help hoping. 
Whatever they think desirable, they expect, 
and they do so by an original instinct and 
necessity of their being. Nothing on earth is 
more divinely beautiful than the bubbling of 
these hopes from the heart of an inexperienced, 
happy, care-free child — not even the gushing 
of water from a fountain, nor the opening of 
a rose from a bud, nor the rising of a star above 
the horizon. And if the origin of hope is 
divinely beautiful, its tenacious persistence 
"5 



Hits and Misses 



through life is divinely wonderful. Nothing is 
so astonishing as the indestructibility of hope. 
How can it survive the innumerable disappoint- 
ments of life? How can it be explained that 
you, that I, we who have seen ten thousand 
hopes decay, should still continue to expect 
"the desirable"? That which we anticipate 
and strive for, never seems to come. It is 
always the unexpected which happens. And 
yet we hope! Hope is the last spark to die in 
the cooling embers of the soul. Only the sui- 
cide is hopeless! When that moment arrives 
in which the spirit says, "I have no further 
hope," we expect a tragedy, for life is insup- 
portable when hope is gone. But while life 
lasts, hope burns in every normal breast — a 
self-sustained fire — and the mystery of the sun, 
apparently supplying its own fuel and creating 
its own energy, is no greater than that of an 
old man's soul generating the light of hope out 
of the black fuel of defeat and disappointment. 

It is, in fact, this independence of hope for 
its existence upon proof or evidence, or expe- 
rience, that constitutes its most mysterious 
beauty. Those great and invincible spirits in 
every age, who have dominated their genera- 
tion, and who have triumphed over every 
obstacle, never asked for a foundation for their 
hopes in experience or in reason. Hope sprang 



Hope, the Equivalent of Knowledge 

from an inward source, and was poised upon 
its own self, like a sun in the heavens. They 
hoped, not because they could demonstrate, but 
could . demonstrate because they hoped. The 
bare feeling within their souls that events were 
desirable, justified anticipation of their realiza- 
tion. They expected them, therefore they 
arrived. Things ought to be, and therefore 
they must be. 

You may think this irrational ; but it is fact, 
that what one might almost call blind hope, has 
led to a thousand times the triumphs of a cal- 
culated wisdom. And it is not unique in this. 
The mightiest potencies within us are unrea- 
sonable. Love is blind; faith is blind; hope is 
blind. But it is these sightless eyes alone that 
lead us safely to our journey's end! Experi- 
ence may help a wild duck to find a berry under 
a leaf in a pond, but it is instinct that guides it 
from Hudson's Bay to the Gulf of Mexico. 
Experience, logic, argument, calculation, may 
help you through to-day; but nothing on earth 
can bear you over the pathless journey of three- 
score years and ten but hope. Experience, logic, 
argument, calculation, have their mission, but it 
is not the mission of hope. Its mission, be- 
lieve me, is infinitely nobler. And you may 
discover that this is so from the fact that the 
grandest moments of your own life have been 
117 



Hits and Misses 



those of the largest hope. Was it when your 
soul was cast down and disquieted within you 
that you knew yourself to be at your best ? No, 
a thousand times ! The sun of life reaches its 
zenith at the moment when it cherishes the 
most unquestioning expectation that its plans 
shall all be realized. 

And it will not do> for you to try to throw a 
cloud over the glory of this sublime capacity 
of the soul by pointing out its apparent untrust- 
worthiness. You affirm that it has deceived 
you, misled you, made you chase the feet of 
ever-receding rainbows. Yes, but it has led 
you on! When you have hoped, you have 
gone forward; when you have despaired, 
backward. And to-day, now, you have cour- 
age to fight, just in proportion as you have 
hope in your heart. If I could to-day rekindle 
the fires of hope in the hearts of some of you 
I could add years to your life, give you "beauty 
for ashes, the oil of joy for mourning, and the 
garment of praise for the spirit of heaviness." 
Oh, cherish hope! You can never tell when 
the long road is going to have its turning. 
Remember upon how slight a circumstance (as 
upon a little pivot) the whole world has some- 
times spun around. Perhaps the next tooth in 
the great wheel of time to slip into a notch, 
will set in operation a train of circumstances 
118 



Hope, the Equivalent of Knowledge 

loaded with blessings for you. Never say die ! 
Never give up the ship ! While there is life, 
there is hope. Hope on ! Hope ever ! Hope 
against hope ! 

"I laugh, for hope is happiness with me. 
If my bark sinks — 'tis to a happier sea." 

said William Ellery Channing. And to all 
great souls, the lesser hope always sinks into the 
larger. 

Now, would it not be strange if this marvel- 
ous faculty of the soul which has such a mis- 
sion in the realm of time and sense had none 
whatever in that spiritual realm of being which 
the generations of men have darkly dreamed of 
ever since humanity came to its consciousness ? 
Believe me that it has, that it is the key to that 
closed door. 

Suppose you have no knowledge of that 
realm ! Suppose you do not even believe in it. 
Suppose you have lost your faith in it. Still 
you can cherish hope. 

You have afflicted yourself with the thought 
that you cannot prove the existence of God 
and the immortality of the soul ! Well, you do 
not need to prove things in order to hope in 
them. If you could prove them, you could 
not hope for them any more than you could 
anticipate the past, or look forward to the 
pleasure of eating a pudding which you de- 
no 



Hits and Misses 



voured yesterday. "Hope that is seen is not 
hope! For what a man seeth, why doth he 
yet hope for? We hope for that we see not, 
and in patience WAIT for it." 

I am still guilty of a thousand mental incon- 
sistencies and absurdities, but I have at least 
been emancipated from that most colossal one 
of all, that leads men to think they cannot take 
any comfort in the thought of God until they 
have demonstrated his existence! We do 
not need to be certain that there is a God be- 
fore we can be blessed and comforted. All we 
need is the privilege of hoping that there is a 
God, of feeling confident that that which we 
so earnestly desire is really true, and I now de- 
clare that nothing in the world but absolute 
proof that there is no God to hope in, could ren- 
der hope irrational. And where in the name 
of heaven is that proof to be found? What 
atheist has ever discovered it? It is impossible 
to prove that there is no God. You cannot 
prove a universal negative. The impossibility 
of proving that there was no form of life more 
minute than the microscope has yet discovered, 
and no star beyond the last one which the tele- 
scope has revealed, is mere child's play com- 
pared with the effort to prove that there is no 
God. In order to prove that there is no God 
you would have to penetrate every corner of 
1 20 



Hope, the Equivalent of Knowledge 

an infinite universe. But if it cannot be 
proven that there is no God, what prevents you 
from hoping that there is? 

The moment that I clearly perceived that 
the non-existence of God could not be demon- 
strated my mind leaped out toward Him with 
a bound. "Let me see anything prevent me 
from hoping now!" 

All my soul wanted was its opportunity. 
Hope ought never to demand anything more 
than the removal of the impossibility of its 
exercise. Nothing can be more irrational than 
for one who has the power of hope, to demand 
proof and demonstration. It is like a falcon 
that has wings, demanding that it should be 
carried upon a hunter's arm, like a package 
of merchandise. Wings were made to traverse 
space with, and hope was made to cross un- 
bridged chasms with. 

You are wrong, you are irrational in your 
craving for demonstration of the being of 
God, in your wailing demand for CER- 
TAINTY. You are wrong, because you 
do not need certainties. You have been en- 
dowed with faculties which enable you to 
dispense with certainties. You do not (or 
at least the noblest and best of men do 
not) demand certainties in practical life, and 
could not have them if you did. The merchant 

121 



Hits and Misses 



who loads his wares upon the deck of a vessel 
has no certainty that it will reach the distant 
wharf. The parents who sacrifice their very 
lives to educate their children have no certainty 
that they will repay those efforts. The heroes 
who consecrate their lives to some great cause 
have no certainty that it will reach a prosperous 
issue. They only ask that no demonstrable im- 
possibility lies in their way, and then they put 
the shoulder of hope to the wheel. All Colum- 
bus asked was to know whether anybody could 
demonstrate that India did not lie to westward. 
He only asked that he might have the privilege 
of hope, and then pointed the prow of his vessel 
out upon an unknown sea. 

Such is the sublime mission and power of 
hope, and if there were no unknown and uncer- 
tain elements in life, hope would be as useless 
to the soul as the vermiform appendage or 
any other "vestigial remain" have become to the 
body. 

And I say unhesitatingly that a man who 
asks for a demonstration of the being of God 
has gone too far. He does not need certain- 
ties. Let him but exercise the power of hope, 
and he will attain the same ends he seeks 
through knowledge. It is possible (and has 
been shown to be, ten thousand billion times,) 
that men could live as if they saw God when 

122 



Hope, the Equivalent of Knowledge 

they did not, as if they could prove his exist- 
ence when they could not — just by the exercise 
of hope, and because this is possible it is asking 
too much to ask for more. The author of this 
psalm did not. He stood squarely upon this 
principle which I have enunciated. He said 
to his soul, "You feel the need of God, then 
hope in God ; no one can say you nay. I can- 
not offer you demonstration, certainty ; but you 
can, hope!''' 

And now, if this be true, we are ready for 
another thought. It does not follow that be- 
cause hope is independent of certainty that it 
may not be greatly strengthened and sup- 
ported by probability. It can! Whenever God 
Almighty wishes a fire to burn, He furnishes 
it with fuel, and He who' has furnished fuel 
for every other fire has filled the universe with 
the kindling wood of hope ! 

The evidences of the existence of God may 
not amount, even when taken in all their mar- 
velous fullness, to a demonstration; but their 
accumulated evidence excites and inflames hope 
to the burning point. 

Let a man for once and all rid himself of the 
demand for absolute demonstration in the evi- 
dence for the being of God, and the fullness of 
that evidence to excite a presumption, and cre- 

123 



Hits and Misses 



ate a probability that he exists, assumes its full 
proportions. 

If you want to believe in God, if you are 
determined to hope there is a God, cast your 
mind over that array of intimations of his being 
which the generations of seekers after 
God have marshaled upon the field of thought. 

It sustains and inflames hope to remember 
that in almost all ages and in almost all cir- 
cumstances the minds of all classes and condi- 
tions of men have been feeling after God if 
happily they might find him. It afreets me to 
see men thus reaching up and groping after 
something, as I think it would to see all plants 
and trees reaching up and groping after some- 
thing, even if I had never seen the sun. There 
must be something drawing them, inviting 
them, exciting them, uplifting them, or they 
would not always be looking up and reaching 
out and hungering for that something ! 

It sustains and inflames hope to observe the 
order, the beauty, the harmony, and the appar- 
ent adaptation of means to end in every nook 
and cranny of this universe into which our eye 
can penetrate. The mechanics of this siderial 
system are indeed celestial. Our minds may be 
disturbed and upset in their reflections for a 
little while by new and startling theories of 
science, but sooner or later, as we gaze upon 
124 



Hope, the Equivalent of Knowledge 

this august and awful piece of mechanism, we 
can no more help thinking that a mind produced 
it than when gazing at a Corliss engine. 

It sustains and inflames hope to behold 
the stupenduous panorama of life unfold- 
ing itself according to fixed and immut- 
able principles, and climbing up from low- 
est forms to highest, from animal to hu- 
man, from material to spiritual. We are 
confounded over and over again by the catas- 
trophies which befall this upward striving of 
the current of life, by the disasters, the strug- 
gles, the cruelties, the groanings that cannot 
be uttered nor comprehended; but sooner or 
later there steals upon us a solemn conscious- 
ness that over it all there broods an eternal and 
an infinite spirit. 

It sustains and inflames hope to see how 
this idea of God has been clarified as the ages 
pass, in the souls of the seers, the prophets, 
and the sages. Sooner or later we are com- 
pelled to see existence through the eyes of the 
world's "great men." It is an irreversible law 
of our being, that the vague emotions of mil- 
lions of common men crystallize finally into the 
clear consciousness of the uncommon man. 
The sage pronounces the word which trembles 
inarticulately upon the lips of the masses. Re- 
ject it as we will, their testimony prevails at 
125 



Hits and Misses 



last. And, to-day, we listen to them once 
again while they speak to us with sublime 
authority. Out of the life of Abraham, of 
Moses, of David, of Elijah, of Isaiah, issues 
the sublime assurance that their souls have 
attained a clear and satisfying vision. And like 
a seraph chanting from some solemn peak of 
heaven, high above earth's jarring and discord- 
ant sounds, the voice of the Divine Man comes 
floating down the ages, "God is a spirit, and 
they that worship Him must worship Him in 
spirit and in truth !" 

Brethren, it is no wonder that when the soul 
of man, asserting its divine prerogative of 
hope, sets before itself the conception of an 
infinite and eternal spirit of love and power and 
wisdom, and excites itself by such kindlings as 
these, that it bursts into a flame of rapture like 
that of Paul when he exclaimed, "For I am 
persuaded that neither death, nor life, nor 
angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor 
things present, nor things to come, nor height, 
nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able 
to separate us from the love of God, which is 
in Christ Jesus, our Lord !" Nor like that of 
John, when he heard, as it were, the voices of a 
great multitude, as if it were the voice of many 
waters and of mighty thunderings, saying, 
"Alleluia ; for the Lord God omnipotent reign- 
126 



Hope, the Equivalent of Knowledge 

eth" — for these evidences so sustain and glorify 
hope that it becomes transfigured into faith, 
and faith is transfigured into belief, and belief 
is transfigured into the full equivalent of knowl- 
edge. It is this state of mind which is called, 
m the Scriptures, "the full assurance of hope." 
It is not knowledge; but to all practical pur- 
poses, it is the same as knowledge. Men come 
to live, to act, to die, as if they knew ! Like 
Moses, they endure as if they saw the invisible. 
And what more do* you need or can you rightly 
ask than a confidence that will really support 
you in all your earthly trials? If you have a 
genuine trust m something which is the full 
equivalent of knowledge, if it leads you to be- 
lieve even though doubt is theoretically possible, 
if it leads you to act as if the issues of conduct 
were certain, although they have not been 
revealed in advance, is it not enough ? 

If you can come to have so deep and abiding 
and unquenchable hope m God that you can 
bear suffering in the full assurance that chas- 
tisement is the measure of love; if you can 
resist temptation in the full assurance that 
heaven will bring your spirit ten thousand com- 
pensation for all the fleeting joys you here deny 
your flesh; if you can look upon the dead 
bodies of your loved ones in full assurance that 
you shall meet their spirits in the other world ; 
127 



Hits and Misses 



if you can regard your own sins in the full 
assurance that God has pardoned them in the 
love of Christ — can certainty make you any 
happier or safer? 

There are multitudes of people who arrive 
at this full assurance of faith. I do not say 
that it is not knowledge, when it reaches this 
point. I think it is. I believe (and you have 
heard me say so too often to doubt it) that the 
soul has a direct and intuitive knowledge of 
God. But it is not what is known as verifiable 
knowledge in the present stage of thought. 
But whether it be knowledge or not, it is its 
practical equivalent. Hope is the practical 
equivalent of knowledge, and what we need is 
the full exposition of this fact. We have been 
led to think that Christian faith somehow or 
other became transmuted into knowledge — 
which is impossible. Faith is not knowledge; 
it is, at best, hope. But hope is the practical 
equivalent of knowledge. 

We have reached the conclusion of our 
meditation, but I must add a few words of 
encouragement and inspiration. 

Hope is capable of cultivation and enlarge- 
ment. Hope is an original capacity of the soul, 
and probably no more easily destroyed than 
memory, imagination or reason. We neglect 
its culture. We permit it to decline. It is 
128 



Hope, the Equivalent of Knowledge 

so much easier to doubt than to hope, as it 
is so much easier to loaf than to labor, to dream 
than to think, to forget than to remember. 
But to-day I say to you with all the confidence 
with which a father says to his son, "you can 
be good if you will" — "you can hope if you 
will." "Hope thou in God." If you ask me 
how you can hope when hope seems dead, I can- 
not tell. But neither can I tell you how you can 
reason, nor how you can imagine, nor how you 
can remember ! These mental processes are all 
mysteries and too deep for analysis, and yet it 
is right that I should say to you, "Think!" 
"Imagine!" "Remember!" And so I say to 
you, "hope" ! 

But if I cannot tell you how to hope, I can 
give you a picture of how hope becomes strong- 
er and stronger by its exercise. 

I have often been told (altho' I do not know 
that it is true) that when the first bridge was 
thrown across the river below Niagara Falls, 
an Indian took his stand upon the bank, placed 
an arrow on his bow and shot it over to the 
Canadian side. To the arrow a silken thread 
was fastened, to the silken thread a wire, and 
to the wire a cable. Strong hands across the 
river seized the silken thread and gently drew 
the wire across and then the mighty cable! 
Upon the cable's invincible strength the bridge 
129 



Hits and Misses 



was hung, and over the bridge thousands and 
thousands of pilgrims have crossed in all these 
passing years. 

And so the first thought shot across the 
chasm to the shores of the other world may 
carry but a tiny thread of hope; but loving 
hands will seize it and draw up strand after 
strand and cable after cable, until upon the 
bridge thus formed an endless procession of 
aspirations, wishes, prayers, shall safely pass 
across. 

This is the figure of an impoverished and 
imperfect human fancy. But in the epistle to 
the Hebrews you may find a symbol given you 
by God. "Hope is an anchor of the soul both 
sure and steadfast, and which entereth that 
within the veil ; whither the forerunner is for 
us entered — even Jesus!" 



130 



Righteousness is Rightness 



"It is no more possible that what would be evil in 
man would be good in God, than that a> circle on 
earth would be a square in heaven." 

— Martineau. 

"Right action always follows right purpose." 

— McKinley at Omaha. 

"I never questioned nor disobeyed an order in my 
military life." 

— W. T. Sherman. 

"As soon as we lay ourselves entirely at His feet, 
we have enough light given us to guide our steps; as 
the foot soldier, who hears nothing of the councils 
that determine the course of the great battle he is in, 
hears plainly enough the word of command which 
he must obey." 

— George Eliot. 

"Lord, who shall abide in Thy tabernacle? Who 
shall dwell in Thy holy hill? He that walketh up- 
rightly, and worketh righteousness and speaketh truth 
in his heart." 

— Psalm. 



Then Peter opened his mouth, and said, Of 
a truth I perceive that God is no respecter of 
persons, but in every nation he that feareth 
Him and worketh righteousness is accepted 
with him. — Acts x. 34, 35. 

In this passage we strike bedrock for the 
erection of all moral and religious systems. 
And what is more, we know we strike it. Com- 
ing upon it after groping through strata after 
strata of loose and shifting material, is like 
hearing the click of the pickax on granite, after 
digging down through sand and gravel. You 
do not have to drive in any spiles as they do in 
the ooze under Venice, or lay down tier upon 
tier of railroad irons, as they do in the sand 
under Chicago ; but find eternal rock, as they 
do on Manhattan Island. "Of a truth, God is 
no respecter of persons : but in every nation he 
that feareth Him and worketh righteousness, is 
accepted with Him." This, I say, is bedrock. 
It is the most fundamental, universal, compre- 
hensive principle of ethics ever formulated by 
man. On it you can build and rest. Every sys- 
tem of morals and religion will have sooner or 
i33 



Hits and Misses 



later to be squared to that principle. God loves 
and accepts righteousness, right living, right 
being, right thinking. No matter when or 
where he sees it, he always accepts it. Right- 
ness or righteousness (the terms to me are 
synonymous) is current coin of the realm, and 
passes in every province of the Universal King- 
dom of moralities. 

Let me speak to you to-day of rightness, of 
righteousness which God loves and accepts, 
always and everywhere. What I have to say 
has been prompted by an observation of Her- 
bert Spencer, in animadverting upon Christian 
ethics, "Rightness expresses of actions what 
straightness does of lines, and there can no 
more be two kinds of right action than there 
can be two kinds of straight lines." There is a 
sense in which that is beautifully true. It rings 
in my soul like a silver bell. But there is also 
a sense in which it is not true, for it does not 
cover all the ground; for as a matter of fact 
there are not only two kinds of straight lines, 
but many hundreds. For example, there is a 
straight line drawn with chalk upon a black- 
board by a schoolboy, who takes such pains to 
make it straight because he does not know how 
to recite his lesson straight, but does know how 
to draw a line straight ! 

Then there is a straight line running along 
i34 



Righteousness is Rightness 

the pediment of the Parthenon, with the beauti- 
ful carvings above it and the beautiful pillars 
below it. Then there is the straight line of the 
horizon to be seen far off upon the rim of 
the ocean, foam-crested, far-stretching, majes- 
tic. Then there is a straight line made by a sun- 
beam, clear from the eye of the bright God of 
day to the surface of the earth. The first is a 
straight line, and nothing else. But in the sec- 
ond, and third, and fourth, the straight line is 
raised, if I may so say, to a higher power of 
both beauty and extension. It is the same, and 
yet not the same. 

And so I say it is with righteousness. At its 
base and in its core, rightness is always the 
same ; but after all, this rudimentary thing may 
become exquisitely developed, and raised to a 
higher power of beauty and extension. One 
rightness may exceed another in loveliness, as 
the sunlight straight line, and the horizon 
straight line, and the Parthenon straight line 
exceed the blackboard straight line. Permit 
me to exhibit rightness to you in ascending 
stages of beauty and glory. 

In the first place, then, men do right deeds 
and think right thoughts, unconsciously. One 
day a little bootblack sat on his box eating a 
loaf of bread. There came creeping up to him 
a barefooted child, a little girl, whose eyes, 
i35 



Hits and Misses 

burning in their sockets, and whose teeth, 
gleaming like fangs through her pale thin lips, 
betokened that she was starving. The boy sur- 
veyed her for a moment, then broke his loaf 
in the middle and threw her half. He was 
young, he was ignorant, he was untutored. He 
did this deed as unconscious of its nature as an 
animal. He did it, in fact, in exactly the same 
way that a Newfoundland dog plunges into the 
water for a drowning man. He obeyed a pri- 
mal instinct; but neither knew that it was an 
instinct, nor that it was primal. It probably 
did not cost him an effort of his will. It orig- 
inated in his emotional and not in his volitional 
nature. He gave this bread, as the cannibal 
mother or a wolf mother give their breasts to 
their young. But in doing so, he performed 
an act of righteousness or rightness, all the 
same. It was one of those deeds that springs 
out of the eternal fitness of things, and is a 
spark struck out from the central fires of good- 
ness. It was another proof that "as birds are 
made to fly and rivers to run, so was the soul to 
follow duty." It was a real deed of rightness, as 
much as a little meteor is a real planet, or a 
little minnow is a real fish, or a little sprig is a 
real tree. It was not the highest and most beau- 
tiful example of rightness ; but it was rightness, 
although he never dreamed that he, a little 
136 



Righteousness is Rightness 

street Arab, was performing in this perfect sim- 
plicity an equivalent of that deed which the 
Christ told the arrogant, metaphysical, self- 
conscious Jews that they must do if they ever 
expected to enter the Kingdom of God, viz., 
to give a cup of cold water to a little child. 
This deed of his was the rudimentary straight 
line of Mr. Herbert Spencer. In a certain sense 
the little Arab's was as straight a line as the 
Apostle John ever made. As far as it went it 
was rightness through and through. He did 
not know that he did so, but in reality he was 
doing just the same sort of a thing which Jesus 
Christ did upon the cross. He acted under the 
impulse of obedience and subordination to an- 
other not himself, to a law higher than his own 
wish, to some far off undiscoverable, unthought 
of Being who sent him here to' do 1 that very 
thing. And the deed was beautiful, even 
though it was imperfect or rather incomplete. 
There is not a human heart sound to the center 
which does not perceive that beauty. There is 
not an angel in heaven who would not shed a 
tear at the sight of it. And what is more, the 
good God accepted it, if we can believe our text 
and the testimony of our souls, as appreciative- 
ly as he ever accepted a deed from the hand of 
saint or martyr. It had its origin, this right 
deed, in the very center of the boy's soul. It 
i37 



Hits and Misses 



sprang out of the rudimentary religious instinct 
of the child's nature. It was truly moral and 
therefore truly religious, for all true morality 
is at the very least unconscious religion. 

Let that stand, then, for one kind of Tight- 
ness, such rudimentary and imperfect Tight- 
ness as one finds among the ignorant and the 
undeveloped and the savage — the best they 
have, but not the best there is — accepted when 
it is the best they have, impossible to be re- 
jected, impossible to be declared ^righteous- 
ness, as the chalk line to be declared wnstraight- 
ness. There may be, there certainly is, much 
evil along with it, enough perhaps to over- 
shadow it, enough to grow up and crush it and 
leave the right-hearted little gamin a miserable, 
degraded and devilish man. But still the deed 
was a right one. 

In the second place men do Tightnesses 
consciously sometimes, under the dominion of 
motives and faiths higher than those of the 
gamin and the savage, but not the highest. 
Having attained the capacity of self-knowledge 
and begun to analyze their deeds and motives, 
they obey the right because it is the right, and 
for no other cause at all. In this obedience they 
are unlike the gamin, in being conscious of 
self; but like him in not being conscious of God. 
Never has there been a case in the history of 
138 



. Righteousness is Rightness 

the world more striking perhaps than that of 
Matthew Arnold. Few men have ever lived 
whose capacity for self-knowledge was more 
profound, or who conformed more strictly to 
those eternal principles of righteousness which 
he intuitively perceived. He loved them with 
passion, and he obeyed them (so far as we can 
tell) with unfaltering devotion. And yet to 
him those ethical laws were only the change- 
less principles in the nature of things, the for- 
mal principles of a material universe. He did 
not believe in God, as we conceive Him. He 
would not believe in what he derisively called 
a "magnified and non-natural man." He 
thought of God only as "the stream of tendency 
by which all things fulfill the law of their be- 
ing." He thought that the God consciousness 
of Jesus could be expressed in these words, 
"God is an influence." All that he felt sure of 
was "that there is a power which makes for 
righteousness," and that it was man's duty to 
yield to that power. 

And this, he did. And in doing this he be- 
lieved that he entered into the religious life. 
He departed from evil and "walked in awful 
observance of an enduring clew within and 
without us which leads to happiness." In this 
he experienced, so he thought, the ecstacy of 
religious feeling. "Righteousness," he af- 
i39 



Hits and Misses 



firmed, "is but a heightened conduct, and holi- 
ness is but a heightened righteousness — a more 
finished, entire and awe-filled righteousness." 
To him religion was ethics heightened, enkin- 
dled, lit up by feeling, morality touched by emo- 
tion. 

Now, just so far as he did right and thought 
right, he was right. Up to that extent he was 
a righteous man. His Tightness was of the 
same character in its essence as that of the little 
street Arab; but it was raised to a higher 
power, and it went farther. For this also> is a 
difference in straight lines and right lines — 
some go farther than the others. One straight 
line, for example, only goes across a short 
blackboard, another goes across a facade of a 
building, a third from one island to another on 
an ocean horizon, and a fourth from earth to 
sun. Arnold's Tightness, then, is not only more 
beautiful, that is to say, raised to a higher pow- 
er, but goes farther than the street Arab's, just 
in proportion to his knowledge of its true na- 
ture and his effort to realize it. If this was all 
he could honestly see, and believe, and do, and 
be in the realm of rightness, then he was as 
righteous as he could be. What he did and 
was, possessed those eternal elements of beauty 
which are inherent even in a partial, rudimen- 
tary, imperfect form of rightness. All men 
140 



Righteousness is Rightness 

must admire it. The angels must recognize it. 
God will accept it. It is current coin. It is 
right, and therefore righteous. To deny this 
would be to confound moral distinctions. It 
would be to call right wrong, and bitter, sweet ; 
to put darkness for light and light for dark- 
ness. No honest man could do this. His very 
soul would protest. He cannot in his heart 
refuse to recognize the essential element of 
rightness in the moral lives of men like Arnold 
and Emerson, and in those of the great agnos- 
tics like Spencer, Huxley, and Darwin. In 
fact there is a sort of beauty in this rightness 
that awakens a peculiar feeling of admiration 
in the mind. Its realization under such diffi- 
cult circumstances, and from such inadequate 
motives, lends a tragic grandeur to it. It is 
like a man's living a pure and happy life in a 
County poor-house, with no wife and children 
to inspire him, and nothing to live for, and 
nothing to labor for, and nothing to hope for. 
It is all / can do, for one, to live my life even 
with all the hopes and incentives of Christian- 
ity. And when I see such men living beautifully 
without those incentives and hopes, I am, as it 
were, struck dumb with admiration. But that 
is not the point. The point is, are such lives 
truly and wholly moral and religious? Has 
rightness or righteousness attained its perfect 
141 



Hits and Misses 



beauty? Has it gone as far and been carried 
up to as high a power as possible? I claim 
that it has not. It is at best a limited and par- 
tial Tightness, because it is not animated by the 
highest motives and conceptions. Even though 
the outward form and expression of such lives 
may be very beautiful, that beauty may be very 
imperfect and of an inferior order. It may ex- 
ceed the righteousness of the scribes and Phar- 
isees enormously, and yet fall far short of the 
ideal. Who knows how much spiritual pride 
may be in it? Who shall say whether it may 
not be clouded by a stubborn human obstinacy ? 
It would be strange indeed if it were wholly 
devoid of these elements which fasten them- 
selves so tenaciously on all human conduct, like 
rust on iron ! 

But give them the utmost credit. Allow that 
so far as they have gone, they are right. Ad- 
mit that they are, whether these men knew it 
or not, truly religious as far as they are truly 
moral. And even then, they have not attained 
their highest power nor gone as far as they 
may. 

For in the third place there is a higher 
form of Tightness or righteousness, and that 
which is inferior can never be the equal of the 
superior. This form is the consummation of all 
the lower forms. It is the efflorescence of that 
142 



Righteousness is Rightness 

rudimentary germ in the street Arab which has 
been carried up through numerous gradations 
and transfigurations in Arnold, and Emerson, 
and Huxley, and Spencer, and Darwin to its 
blossom and its fruit in John and Jesus. It is 
a righteousness or rightness having its origin 
in love and loyalty to a Heavenly Father who 
is himself the eternal source of all righteous- 
ness. The rightness of the Arab is the beauty 
of the life of the plant in the bulb. That of the 
philosopher is that life in the stalk, but that of 
Jesus is that life in the bloom. 

Perhaps the demonstration of this assertion 
is impossible. At any rate, we have our faiths 
and our intuitions. And this is mine. 

All conduct becomes more beautiful in pro- 
portion as it is inspired by loyalty to intelligence 
and hearts rather than to forces and laws! 

And so there is a sublimity in rightness high- 
er than even the tragic grandeur of those who 
do right because they feel a force and law, a 
power not themselves which makes for right- 
eousness. And it is that sublimity which grows 
out of duty done in humble devotion to a 
Heavenly Father whose will and wisdom we 
trust with absolute devotion. I say that per- 
haps I cannot prove this; but I can at least 
give my reasons. And they are such as these : 

a. The conduct of a little orphan child that 
143 



Hits and Misses 



bends humbly, patiently, blindly to a set of rules 
posted on the door of an asylum, issuing from 
sources the nature of which he knows nothing 
and which stand for his limited intelligence as 
mere abstractions, but terribly real and true, 
may have a beauty of its own, and really has 
this beauty, a beauty tragic and pathetic. But 
when the child has been transplanted from an 
asylum to a home, and knows that those same 
principles of conduct are not only enunciated 
by the lips of his new found parents, but are 
incarnated in their beautiful and tender lives, 
he now obeys them through a passionate devo- 
tion, admiration and love for those beings who 
brood over him, and pray over him, and fold 
him to their hearts, and kiss him with a ten- 
derness which melts him to tears. Then, to 
me at least, his obedience and his Tightness 
have undergone a transfiguration, have been 
crowned with a new glory, and have reached 
their final efflorescence. 

b. And so the strict and dogged obedience 
of a soldier to every regulation of the camp and 
every order of the manual may have a certain 
element of beauty and a certain modicum of 
Tightness ; but when at last there comes a gen- 
eral in whose scarred face, whose commanding 
person, whose princely manners, whose royal 
soul, all those regulations and orders have be- 
i 44 



Righteousness is Rightness 

come incarnated, and the soldier becomes in- 
flamed, lit up, and lifted out of himself in a 
passion of personal loyalty to this great leader, 
to me, at least he has carried duty and right- 
eousness up immeasurably higher than before. 

Whether I am right or not, it seems to be 
a law of our human life that the moment the 
principles and laws of being are incarnated in 
some great leader, some sublime personality, 
we leap to them in him, as drooping plants rise 
at the fall of the rain. Dull, stupid, lethargic, 
lifeless obedience is suddenly kindled into pas- 
sionate and sublime enthusiasms. In the last 
number of one of our great journals, a pro- 
found thinker began an article with this simple 
aphorism : "A young man naturally, and a 
middle-aged man of necessity, chooses giants 
for guides." And what is this assertion but the 
disclosure of the fact that we need to recognize 
all virtue, and power, and law as originating 
in, or at least emanating from, personality. 

Xow and then there may be a great philoso- 
pher who is capable of rendering obedience to 
"a power not ourselves" (and not a magnified 
and non-natural man), which makes for right- 
eousness. But the masses of men have never 
yet been able to do it ; or, if they have done it, 
to do it heartily, and joyously, in the genuine 
beauty of holiness and righteousness. 
H5 



Hits and Misses 



But whenever and wherever a genuine faith 
in a personal God whom we may justly call our 
Father has been awakened, conduct has under- 
gone a marvelous transformation. Mere cold 
and formal obedience has been transfigured into 
the glorious and passionate devotion of saints 
and martyrs. 

And, to my mind, this is the essential char- 
acteristic of the beauty, of the righteousness of 
Jesus Christ. I cannot think of him as render- 
ing obedience to an impersonal power that 
makes for righteousness. He came to do the 
will of a Heavenly Father. The laws which he 
obeyed appear to have seemed to him the 
personal volitions of this divine Parent. He 
no more conceived of them as the impersonal 
principles of a material cosmos than as the 
ordinances of a set of blind-eyed Scribes and 
Pharisees. Whenever he heard the call of duty, 
it seemed to him the voice of a Father's love; 
whenever he saw a pathway of toil and labor 
opened, he saw a presence walking before him ; 
when the cross was laid upon his shoulders he 
felt the kindly touch of the hand which placed 
it there. And this was what made his life radi- 
ant with confidence. This was what transfig- 
ured his conduct. Other men have done the 
same deeds that he did, but not in the same 
way. And, to me, that which differentiates 
146 



Righteousness is Rightness 

Him from them all, and His deeds from theirs, 
is this very clear apprehension of that Father 
whom the philosophers ridicule as a magnified 
and non-natural man. 

It is easy to ridicule this idea, for it is so 
sacred. In fact, the more sublime and sacred a 
thing is, the easier it is to be ridiculed. Noth- 
ing is easier to ridicule than a boy's love and 
reverence for his mother, or a man's love and 
reverence for his God. And sometimes we 
must confess that men make their own faith 
absurd. We belittle our faith by dragging God 
down to the level of the little trivialities of our 
lives and making it seem to others as if the Be- 
ing we adored had nothing else to do but tie 
our shoes or find our lost pins. 

A Welshman who visited London while ex- 
tensive sewage improvements were going on 
is said to have lost his watch. He reported the 
matter to Scotland Yard, and the officials as- 
sured him that they would leave no stone un- 
turned to find the missing timekeeper. On re- 
turning to his wanderings about the great me- 
tropolis, Taffy saw not only stones upturned, 
but street after street torn up by the laborers 
who were laying sewer pipes, and was told 
there were thirty-six miles of road in the same 
condition. This quick and unstinted interest 
in his personal affairs astonished him, and, 
147 



Hits and Misses 



rushing back to the office, he exclaimed to the 
wondering inspector, "I didn't think I was giv- 
ing you all that trouble. If you don't find the 
watch by Sunday, I wouldn't tear up any more 
streets." There may be religious people as 
credulous as the Welshman and who think that 
God has nothing else to do but tear up the uni- 
verse to find their watches. 

But this absurd egotism is not that simple, 
intelligent and reverent recognition of a Heav- 
enly Father of which we speak, of which Jesus 
gave us our supreme illustration, and which 
Tennyson felt when he uttered those memora- 
ble words, "Take away belief in the self-con- 
scious personality of God, and you take the 
backbone out of the universe!" In it, there 
has never been any absurdity, and its results 
have always been sublime. That faith in his 
wisdom and his love has sustained the saints 
and heroes in their highest endeavors, and lifted 
their moralities up into the realm of holiness. 
It was this strong confidence that made the life 
of Theophilus Wilson, whose body lies on Col- 
lege Hill awaiting his burial, an idyl, a hymn, 
a psalm, an epic. He, too, like Moses, lived as 
if he saw the invisible. In him also morality 
was lifted up, grade after grade, into holiness. 
The bulb shot up into the stalk, and the stalk 
broke into the blossom. The rudimentary 
148 



Righteousness is Rightness 

righteousness of the savage was transfigured 
into that of the philosopher, and the philoso- 
pher's glorified into that of the saint. 

And so as there are trees and trees, lines and 
lines, stars and stars, there are righteousnesses 
and righteousnesses. And although Peter 
found in the rough and earnest Roman soldier 
a certain rightness which God could not reject, 
yet who does not believe that in the after years 
of his life, it suffered a sea change into some- 
thing new and strange and became as much 
more beautiful than a Roman soldier's right- 
ness, as a sunbeam straight line is than a school 
boy's chalk line. 

Rightness or righteousness is capable then 
of apotheosis after apotheosis. Conduct and 
life may become more and more right and beau- 
tiful, acceptable with God and man. It is a 
wonderful thought, that we may here prepare 
a character and a method of life that, as I said 
at first, are current coin in every corner of 
God's universe, and that will admit a man to 
any society. 

Under the influence of this sublime trust and 
love for the Heavenly Father, David Living- 
stone acquired a sort of rightness that made 
him equally at home in a palace or a hovel. It 
was not only a passport to Windsor and to 
Westminster, but a safe conduct among sav- 
149 



Hits and Misses 



ages and cannibals. He was everywhere and 
always a right man, a righteous man, and was 
as much at home in heaven the first day he 
entered as among the huts of the dark skinned 
savages on the banks of the Congo. 

Lives like those of Cornelius and Livingstone 
are right lives, and God cannot reject them. 
But even these are not perfect lives, my friend. 
That which is right in them is right, and God 
recognizes it. But in all of them, how much 
there is of wrong! 

Dear David Livingstone — apostle, martyr, 
saint — he felt the need of sheltering himself be- 
neath a righteousness greater than his own. It 
was the hope of that humbled heart that when 
he stood before the great All Father, He would 
impute to him the "righteousness" of Christ. 
And this was the hope of Theophilus Wilson, 
and of that long list of saints who have criti- 
cized their own imperfect rightness in the light 
of the Savior's perfectness. 

It is this "second" kind of righteousness 
which Mr. Spencer animadverts upon, perhaps. 

"There are two kinds of Christian righteous- 
ness : the one without us, which we have by 
imputation ; the other in us, which consisteth of 
faith, hope, charity, and other virtues," said the 
great and good Hooker. For one, I share this 
feeling of the need of having a goodness im- 
150 



Righteousness is Rightness 

puted to me which is greater than my own. 
Who does not feel that we must daily and hour- 
ly be treated by all men as if we were, what we 
are not? Is not this true of every relationship 
of life which is based on love? Do you, sir, 
or do you, madam, think that your wife or your 
husband loves you only for your own good- 
ness ? Then I must disabuse you of that agree- 
able but mistaken solace. Over the varied and 
offensive imperfections of your life they throw 
the mantle of their own love. They love you 
not only for what you are, but in spite of what 
you are. "With all you faults, they love you 
still !" It is the holy nature of love, thus to 
cover up the faults of others under the robe of 
its own right mindedness. And it is this ten- 
derness of the divine heart of God as revealed 
in Christ to which the humbled and the peni- 
tent in all ages have made their appeal. They 
have done their best, and they have done beau- 
tifully and rightly often. But how much they 
have left undone! How incomplete and im- 
perfect have those lives and characters been in 
spite of all. And so they have cast themselves 
upon that divine compassion which treats them 
as if they were what they are not, as every lover 
treats the object of that love. 

If this conception of Christian ethics is an 
error, if it is to sail under false colors to claim 
151 



Hits and Misses 



a Tightness not one's own, then the whole meth- 
od of earthly love is also wrong. But its 
method is not wrong. We may trust and we 
may claim from all our loved ones, the impu- 
tation of a goodness not our own. And this we 
trust and plead with God. 

We may not abuse it. We may not exoner- 
ate ourselves from the passionate effort to raise 
our own rightness up to its highest power of 
beauty ; but when we have attained our utmost 
limit we must plead and trust a divine tender- 
ness and compassion for our imperfections. 



152 



The Sacred Leaven of Sorrow 



"The mind profits by the wreck of every passion, 
and we may measure our road to wisdom by the sor- 
rows we have undergone." 

— Bulwer-Lytton. 

"Whatever below God is the object of our love, will 
at some time or other be the matter of our sorrow." 

— Cecil. 

"Ah! if you knew what peace there is in an ac- 
cepted sorrow." 

— Mme. Guyon. 

"I cannot but think that he who finds a certain 
proportion of pain and evil inseparably woven up 
in the life of the very worms, will bear his own share 
with more courage and submission." 

— Huxley. 



For our light affliction, which is but for a 
moment, worketh for us a far more exceeding 
and eternal weight of glory; while we look not 
at the things which are seen, but at the things 
which are not seen: for the things which are 
seen are temporal; but the things which are 
not seen are eternal. — 77. Cor. iv, 17, 18. 

Let us at the very outset clearly perceive and 
firmly grasp the idea in the mind of the apostle. 

It is, that we misjudge our earthly life be- 
cause we look only upon its surface, while if we 
took the trouble to gaze down into its depths, 
we should perceive that, the existence of which 
explains the elements which confound our un- 
derstanding. For example — Sorrow! 

Something lies back of its visible manifesta- 
tion and down below its surface, which is work- 
ing silently, slowly, and imperceptibly ; but with 
an accuracy and a certainty like the mechanism 
of the sidereal system, to accomplish results 
whose ultimate manifestation will explain and 
justify the whole bewildering operation. 

The affliction itself works ! Not you; but the 
affliction! There is something in pain and suf- 
iS5 



Hits and Misses 



fering that is like yeast, and which works, and 
works, and works ! 

To some of us all the time, and to most of us 
some of the time, life seems a hotch-potch, a 
pot-pourri of most miscellaneous events. Each 
day is like a bucket of a chain pump coming up 
out of a great grab-bag of disconnected and 
meaningless experiences, and emptying them 
helter-skelter into our existence. Some are 
good and some are bad, and each one is to be 
judged by itself, apart from all the rest. Sor- 
rows and joys, successes and reverses, hopes 
and disappointments are all jumbled together, 
and we regard the collocated events of a month 
or a year much as we would a mass of house- 
hold materials thrown out upon the sidewalk 
from the window of a burning building. 

How few people in any community, how few 
in any age, really and truly believe in the hidden 
law that binds them into a beautiful unity! 
How few cherish a profound and sincere con- 
viction that there is in this mass of apparently 
uncorrelated events an invisible element that is 
working like yeast in dough, like force in a 
crystal, like life in a plant, organizing and mar- 
shaling all into something homogeneous, beau- 
tiful and satisfying to the soul ! 

How is it with you ? Do you believe that all 
there is of life is lying in plain sight upon the 
156 



The Sacred Leaven of Sorrow 



surface, or do you believe that there is an invis- 
ible something working in its great deeps? 

Let us examine this matter. 

a. In the first place, in every realm of life 
there are one or more invisible elements, and 
it is these alone which are of any permanent 
significance. I have already instanced the 
dough, the crystal, and the plant. What is it 
that you really see in them? Nothing but the 
particles of matter which the unseen forces are 
shifting from one place to another, as the invis- 
ible electricity moves the visible wheels. And 
it is not the dough nor the diamond nor the 
plant that is of permanent importance, but the 
forces which inhere within them; for as long 
as they find matter to work with, they will make 
other dough and diamonds and plants. 

Now let your minds dwell for a moment upon 
those multitudinous forces which are thus 
working silently and invisibly in the plastic ma- 
terial of the visible world. You see the clouds 
go drifting across the sky, but you do not see 
the shepherd wind which drives them onward 
like a flock of sheep. You see the floods of sun- 
light, but not the waves of the ether. You see 
the needle move around the dial of the compass, 
but not the magnetic current which propels it. 
You see the multitudinous forms which clothe 
themselves in matter, but not the whirling 
i57 



Hits and Misses 

atoms which are the very essence of that mat- 
ter. You see the rivers gliding to the sea 
and the planets moving through the sky, 
but not the awful force of gravity which 
ever draws them to the ocean or guides 
them on their journeys through the infinite 
depths of space. You see the myriad liv- 
ing things which swim in seas, and flit 
in sunny atmospheres, and creep through for- 
ests or burrow in the bowels of the earth ; but 
not the life which animates those living things. 
And look at man ! Here is a soldier leading a 
forlorn hope, an inventor perfecting a new ma- 
chine, an orator swaying an audience as a storm 
sways the tops of the trees in a forest. You see 
their hands move, their lips quiver, their cheeks 
blanche, their eyes flash ; but these are not the 
men themselves. There is something hidden 
in them, producing these outward manifesta- 
tions which no one ever saw, an imponderable 
essence eluding the keenest vision, and mock- 
ing the most searching investigation. It is the 
psychos, the animus, the mind, the soul, the 
spirit ! It flashes on you in a smile, it startles 
you with a frown, it saddens you with a tear, 
and in these emanations you almost think you 
have beheld the thing itself. But just as you 
seem about to seize it, you know that it has 
gone, and yet you know that if you had the 
158 



The Sacred Leaven of Sorrow 



organ for its perception, it would stand before 
you the one abiding and imperishable reality 
among all these evanescent forms. 

And what must we conclude from this? Is 
the audible, visible, tangle world the real one; 
or that other world, of which these perceptible 
forms are but the transient manifestations ? Is 
all of life upon the surface, or is the most of it 
hidden in its unfathomable depths ? Are we not 
driven to say that nothing which we see is of 
any consequence at all, save as a manifestation 
of those holy things we do not see? 

b. In the second place, in every realm of life 
or being these invisible forces are producing 
not only visible; but also invisible results. 

I mean by this, that at any given moment in 
which you examine their operations, that which 
you see being done is only a small and inferior 
part of that which they are really accomplish- 
ing. They are all at work upon webs, the pat- 
terns of which are so delicate that we can never 
tell when they are finished, and they play into 
each other in such a way that we clearly see 
that there is no real end to any one of them. 
So true is this, that no process of nature which 
is absolutely new to us could give us any real 
clew to its final outcome, and experience alone 
can guide us to any conception of the results 
of these mysterious operations. 

iS9 



Hits and Misses 



Suppose, for example, that you had never 
known anything at all about the incubation of 
an egg. You enter a barn, and somewhere in 
a quiet corner of the hay mow, you find an old 
brown leghorn hen sitting quietly and solemnly 
in her nest. You watch her for an hour or so, 
and perhaps come back another day, and then 
the next. In all this time you have not seen her 
move a muscle, draw a breath nor wink an 
eye. Astounded at the spectacle, you draw a 
little nearer, thinking she may be dead, and 
stretch out your hand to discover. In another 
instant you have satisfied your curiosity. Every 
feather is as full of life as a young serpent, and 
a piece of your forefinger is in her bony bill ! 
And if your courage and your curiosity have 
survived this onslaught, you may put your 
hand beneath her body. What can it mean? 
Here are a dozen eggs which are slowly being 
addled by a heat that seems to issue from a 
furnace. 

What is it all about? You cannot tell. All 
that lies upon the surface resembles idiocy or 
lunacy. But there is something beneath the 
surface. An operation is taking place than 
which there is nothing more beautiful or won- 
derful in the whole realm of nature. Results 
of the most invisible and surprising character 
are being slowly but surely attained, of which 
1 60 



The Sacred Leaven of Sorrow 



what you see could not afford the slightest 
clew. A tiny bill is picking through each shell. 
A little life is budding there. And soon the 
proud and happy mother leads her downy 
brood out into the wide, wide world. 

Suppose that you were a man of some for- 
gotten era, issuing from a cave after an age- 
long sleep, and should stumble into the engine 
room of a great manufactory. You behold the 
fiery furnaces, the whirling fly-wheel, the 
plunging piston, the sooty firemen, the grimy 
engineer, and see that all is motion, all is meas- 
ureless power. But what is it for? Nothing 
comes of it. Nothing is getting done. It does 
not give the slightest hint of any purpose and 
any other end. 

But let me lead you through the upper rooms. 
Here, in these beautiful webs of silk (woven 
from the cocoon of worms as ignorant as you 
of what they themselves were doing), rich with 
lustrous loveliness and iridescent sheen, you see 
an end attained which inexperience could never 
guess. Who would dream that in a rotting 
acorn was being built a living oak, or that in 
the entrails of a nasty grub there was the 
eidolon of a beautiful butterfly. 

What could you imagine could be the result 
of a battle if you did not know? Stand with 
me on this promontory overlooking the bay of 
161 



Hits and Misses 



Santiago. A Sabbath stillness broods upon 
the world. A dozen ships are floating on the 
waters, like the clouds upon the sky, and songs 
and prayers are wafted from their decks. 
Hush ! it is the very peace of God ! 

Quietly, stealthily another flock of vessels 
like themselves comes creeping through the 
harbor's mouth. Hark ! the silence of death is 
on the world. A sudden shiver runs through 
the sleeping fleet. The ships awake! With 
leaps and plunges and swoopings, like lions, 
tigers, eagles, they fall upon their foes. Gar- 
nered lightnings flash from their sides. Thun- 
ders peal and echo and reverberate. Crash fol- 
lows crash. They reel and stagger like 
drunken men. Conflagrations burst forth from 
the holds of the Spanish ships, and their decks 
are red with blood. The groans of dying men 
are heard. 

What does it mean? If all there is of war 
lies here upon the surface, then war is hell ! 

But there is something there you do not see. 
It is working, working, working, and in a few 
short days will have achieved the liberation of 
millions of men from degradation. The clash- 
ings of these leviathans will change the geog- 
raphy of the world. That which you have seen 
is a phantom, a phantasmagoria. The reality, 
you did not see at all. And so with the whole 
162 



The Sacred Leaven of Sorrow 



war, of which this was only a battle. Stupen- 
dous changes have been wrought; but no one 
knew what was going on under the stagnant 
surface of our national life six months before 
it was churned into this foam. And yet the 
wheels were revolving then; the mighty yeast 
was working, the eggs were being hatched; 
though all was out of sight, until the sublime 
denouement, the marvelous disclosure. The 
people did not see it. The Senators did not see 
it. The President did not see it. 

And still the wheels are going round. What 
web is being wrought in those subterranean 
chambers now, think you? You cannot tell. 
The great depths are too deep. But the end is 
not yet. Fabrics of a still more wondrous 
beauty are being wrought upon those hidden 
looms. God's weavers are very still. They do 
not even whisper at their toil. They keep their 
secrets well. 

And here we pause to get our bearings, and 
turn the light which we have found, upon the 
individual problems of our earthly lives. 

Two things are clear. There is an invisible 
element. That invisible element is producing 
undiscoverable results. And this is true of 
sorrow, the Apostle says. 

We must deal with sorrow, you and I ; for 
the most of us have reached a point where dis- 
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Hits and Misses 



appointment and loss confront us at every 
turn. The days of boundless hopes and glori- 
ous confidence have passed. We have missed 
too many joys to feel at ease about the future. 
We have ceased to count our chickens before 
they are hatched. The game has too often 
escaped the hunter, to encourage him to boast 
until he has it in his bag. 

On one of my many country walks I saw a 
couple of little boys come rushing around the 
corner of a farm house. One of them had a 
flobert gun, and they were evidently in pursuit 
of an English sparrow. He lighted on a twig 
at last, an innocent and shining mark. The 
eager Nimrod laid his gun across a fence, shut 
his left eye, took long, deliberate aim — and 
fired ! 

"Did you hit him?" said I, although I had 
seen the sparrow flit into the foliage as easy and 
care-free as if the bullet had been a ladybug. 

"I didn't kill him ; but I feathered him !" 
said my little Nimrod, shaking his proud head 
back and forth in sublime assurance. 

When you were a little boy, did you ever 
totally miss a bird ? I never did. I always 
saw the feathers fly. But now, someway, I 
have to have my birds in my bag before I think 
I have hit them. I have missed so many shots 
that I have lost my imagination. 

164 



The Sacred Leaven of Sorrow 



Yes, there are more misses than hits. Our 
game-bag is not very full. Our hearts are 
pretty empty at times. Our hopes have not 
all materialized. Disappointment has dogged 
us. We have suffered; yes, we have suffered! 
We do not need a dictionary to know what 
pain and sorrow are. 

But do we know what they are in their 
nature ? Do we know what lies under their 
agitated surfaces down in the great deeps? 

My friends, there is a divine yeast of blessing 
in them. And it is working, working, work- 
ing. 

So far, we are on scientific ground. We 
can easily believe that this invisible element is 
to be found in sorrow. But what is it working, 
good or ill? There' 's the rub. Do we not enter 
a realm of hopeless conjecture here? 

I do not believe it. Nothing in the history 
of human life has ever received a stronger, 
more unanimous, or more overwhelming testi- 
mony than this — that to him who misuses and 
abuses sorrow, it proves a deadly curse, while 
to him who accepts it in humility and love, a 
blessing and a glory. We stand on scientific 
ground here if anywhere. The facts that good 
food, and sleep, and exercise produce health, 
that industry and economy procure wealth, 
that kindness and self-forgetfulness awaken 



Hits and Misses 



love, are no better vouched for by human testi- 
mony than that there is an invisible something 
in sorrow that engenders blessing to him who 
accepts it in faith and humility. 

What is your mental attitude toward your 
own sorrows? Are you bearing them with 
fortitude and accepting them with faith ? This 
is what God's saints have always done. They 
saw no more than you see. The potent yeast 
was just as indiscernible to them, but they be- 
lieved. They could not be persuaded that sor- 
row in its nature was evil. Nothing could 
shake their faith that all things were working 
together for good to them that loved God? 
They did not try to diminish their sorrows by 
forgetfulness ; but they ennobled and glorified 
them with confidence and hope. They suffered 
as much as we; they saw no more than we, 
but they trusted more than we. 

Let us cast ourselves upon their testimony. 
Let us hear the words of Christ with faith. 
Come unto Me all ye that labor and are heavy 
laden, and / will give you rest! He bore his 
own sorrows in this way, and he knows how to 
teach us to bear ours. 

Is it not plain, then, that what we need is 
faith in the invisible ? What will become of us 
if we fret and worry all the time about what 
the wheels are doing out of sight? The house- 
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The Sacred Leaven of Sorrow 



wife does not worry about the yeast, nor the 
farmer about the seed. The old brown leghorn 
hen is not worrying about the silent and invis- 
ible operations of incubation as she sits dozing 
over her eggs. The little children are not 
worrying about the invisible processes by which 
their Christmas presents are being prepared, as 
they lie sweetly slumbering in their cribs. You 
have told them this time, as you tell them 
always (and thank God you can never persuade 
them) that times are hard, and they must not 
expect many presents. They just go off to 
school or climb into their little cots at night 
with a sublime, unclouded faith in the invisible. 
They know that it is working for them. All 
day long down there in the dusty mill or 
crowded store their invisible father is earning 
the money to buy their dolls and sleds. Late 
into the night, by the light of the flickering 
lamp, their mother sits stitching and stitching, 
and the old grandmother is knitting and knit- 
ting, and sister is dressing the dolly, and 
brother is making a cradle, and the fingers of 
uncles and cousins and aunts are working and 
working while their dear hearts are sleeping 
and sleeping and dreaming and dreaming ! 

We need such trust as this. What sorrow 
wants to do her perfect work in, is quiet, restful 
hearts. If we could lie in our nests like the 
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Hits and Misses 



eggs and let the Divine Spirit brood upon us, 
a sweeter life would dawn within us. Let us 
lie more quietly in the hands of God. Let us 
think less of the visible and more of the invisi- 
ble. Let us not care so much for what is 
going on upon the surface as what is being 
wrought down in the great deeps. 

And so shall we see that these light afflictions 
which are but for a moment will work out for 
us, even here, the most strange and surprising 
results. We shall find that they give us a new 
patience, gentleness, humility, and repose. 
They will bring us a new consideration for 
others, a diviner charity, a tenderer sympathy. 
They will ripen us as sun and sap ripen the 
fruit on the tree or bring the plant to bloom. 

And what they will do here — is but a faint 
hint, a feeble adumbration, of what they will 
accomplish for us in the long hereafter. They 
will work out for us a far more exceeding and 
eternal weight of glory, when we have come 
up out of our great tribulations. 



1 68 



Can Believe, Who Will Believe 



"What we ardently wish we soon believe." 

— Young. 

"Begin by regarding everything from a moral point 
f view and you will end by believing in God." 

— Thomas Arnold. 

— "One in whom persuasion and belief 

Had ripened into faith, and faith became 
A passionate intuition." 

— Wordsworth. 

"If Jesus Christ is a man 
And only a man, I say 
That of all mankind I cleave to Him, 
And to Him will cleave alway. 

"If Jesus Christ is a God 
And the only God, I swear 
I will follow Him through heaven and hell, 
The earth, the sea, and the air." 



Jesus said unto him: If thou canst believe — 
all things are possible to him that believeth. 
And straightway the father of the child cried 
out and said with tears — Lord, I believe, help 
thou mine unbelief. — Mark ix, 23-24. 

"I would give all that I possess to recover my 
lost faith," said the man, and heaved a profound 
sigh. 

I shall imagine that this man, and all who 
ever uttered this complaint and heaved this sigh, 
are seated before me, and shall try to point out 
the fatal misconception of the capacities of the 
human mind, which (according to my own 
experience and observation) lurks traitorously 
in that wail of helplessness. 

You have lost your belief in the great doc- 
trines of the Christian religion, and you think 
you have no power to recover it. That is to 
say, you do not believe that a man is a free 
moral agent in the realm of religious faith. 
You think that there is some insuperable 
obstacle which prevents you from believing in 
the immortality of the soul, in divine Provi- 
dence, in answer to prayer, in the incarnation, 
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Hits and Misses 



etc., and that even if you should determine to 
believe, and try your very hardest to believe, 
you could not. 

Well, I meet you on your own ground and tell 
you frankly that I do not think you understand 
the operations of the mind. I have the cour- 
age to say this because for twenty years or 
more on account of a natural tendency to skep- 
ticism in the very fibers of my being, I have 
had the delicate mechanism of my soul under 
my eye, as a jeweler, with his glass gripped 
under his beetling brow, has a broken watch, 
in the light of some sunny southern win- 
dow. I have watched those delicate wheels 
go round and round, until I have formed a cer- 
tain psychology for my own self and out of 
my own reflection. It may be right or it may 
be wrong; but it is the best I have; it is my 
own, and it has served me in many a rough 
place on the journey, and such as I have, give 
I thee. 

"If thou canst believe," said Jesus to the 
man. "I can, I will — help thou me" — he 
answered as if he saw and felt that in the 
domain of religious faith as nowhere else 1 — 
the mind moved with strange, inviolable free- 
dom. This is what I believe. I believe that 
while there are realms in which the mind moves 
according to an inviolable necessity in accept- 
172 



He Can Believe, Who Will Believe 

ing or rejecting conceptions presented to it — 
in the realm of religious ideas — it moves in an 
inviolable freedom, and that any honest man 
who sincerely wants to believe in the Christian 
religion can be shown that he is free to do so. 

Let us examine some of these mysterious 
operations of our minds. 

A. In the first place in the realm of the ma- 
terial elements which lie about us, and con- 
stitute the immediate environment of our lives, 
we have no freedom at all (or only the most 
narrow margin) as to what we must believe 
about its existence and relation to us. 

Matter is real. It impinges upon us. It is 
something not ourselves. Fire burns, frost 
bites, lightnings flash, thunders peal, birds sing, 
flowers bestow a perfume. Night falls. Day 
dawns. Sickness makes flesh quiver. Death 
stalks in, touches the brow, and all is over ! 

Doubt these facts if you can ! Offer a man 
a million dollars if he will doubt a single item, 
and laugh at him while he wriggles and twists 
with the most violent but futile efforts of his 
will ! The intellect is as helpless as a fish 
frozen in a block of ice! Now and then a 
crack-brained philosopher, shut up in a closet 
with a few books and a tallow candle, persuades 
himself that he believes there is no such thing 
as a world of matter outside his own soul. At 
i73 



Hits and Misses 



intervals recurring with suspicious regularity, 
a sect springs up which denies the reality of 
pain and persuades itself, that all suffering is in 
the imagination. But a goat butts the phi- 
losopher or a cramp seizes the Christian Scien- 
tist and crash ! The world rolls in upon the soul 
with its indubitable and irresistible evidence 
of itself. Doubt it we cannot. Believe it we 
must. It is no matter of choice, but of in- 
violable necessity. 

B. In the second place the mind sometimes 
works under the same inviolable necessity in 
the realm of ideas — of abstract thought — as for 
example, in regard to axiomatic or intuitional 
truths. A man is no more free to disbelieve 
that two bodies cannot occupy the same place 
at the same time, than he is to have his head 
both in his hat and out of it, when he takes it 
off to a lady! It would be a very amusing 
thing to watch the antics of a soul which was 
trying to believe that things which were equal 
to the same thing were not equal to each other. 

Nor is the inviolable necessity by which the 
mind is forced to accept certain ideas confined 
to the realm of the intuitions alone. It takes a 
long time for a boy to grasp that remorseless 
system of logical inferences by which it is 
proven that a square constructed upon the 
hypothenuse of a right angled triangle, is equal 
174 



He Can Believe, Who Will Believe 

to the sum of the squares on the other two sides. 
But as each step of the process is slowly dis- 
closed to him, he is compelled to take it ! His 
mind may hold back and struggle, but it has 
to go! A conscript was never forced into 
the army, nor a thief dragged to jail, nor a 
man swept over Niagara by any more resistless 
power than this little tow-headed, tear-stained 
Euclid is pulled and hauled to the conclusion of 
those resistless processes of thought. He has 
about as much freedom to go his own way as 
an owl in the talons of a flying eagle, or a lamb 
in the jaws of a hungry lioness hurrying home 
to her cubs. 

A mind without such necessities and certain- 
ties, would be about as useful as a watch whose 
wheels moved at their own sweet will. It is 
this fixed necessity in its operation that makes 
the mind an instrument capable of the discovery 
of truth. 

C. In the third place — the mind operates by 
these same kinds of necessities in still another 
realm, although the margin of freedom begins 
to widen here, and the line outside of which it is 
exercised, is by no means so easily discerned. 
I refer to the realm of scientific and historical 
knowledge, etc. The laws which govern the 
acquisition of knowledge in these realms are 
very obscure or at least difficult of comprehen- 
ds 



Hits and Misses 

sion by the unlearned. The science of logic is 
to most men as unfamiliar and repulsive as 
Sanscrit, but those who know it well, behold 
the human intellect moving under laws and 
principles as fixed as those of the planets. The 
soul in the grip of a syllogism is no less helpless 
than the kid in the grip of an anaconda. 
Everywhere, and in all circumstances, all men, 
whether they know it or not, are being passed 
along from the hands of major and minor 
premises to conclusions, with as resistless cer- 
tainty as grains of wheat are being passed 
through upper and nether millstones into flour 
bags. There are vast tracts and regions of 
facts and laws and principles of life where 
truths are not yet discovered and arranged, in 
which there is room enough for difference of 
opinion, and for the freest and most indepen- 
dent choice of widely contrasted alternatives. 
The evidences for and against "expansion," or 
socialism, or Darwinianism, and ten thousand 
other things, are either not clearly understood, 
or are not equally accessible to all men — and 
there remains for them the widest possible 
latitude for choice or for uncertainty. But 
there come times in the evolution of ideas when 
this freedom no longer exists. Let a man try 
to disbelieve the laws of Kepler, or the Coperni- 
can theory of the Sidereal universe, or the 
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He Can Believe, Who Will Believe 



reality of the French Revolution or the actual 
existence of such men as Charlemagne or 
Caesar or Alexander the Great ! What power 
does the mind possess to do so ? It can no 
more doubt these facts than it can disbelieve 
what it does believe. 

Nor has it any more power to restore a faith 
which it has once lost in this realm ! Science 
has made it as impossible to believe in witches 
and fairies as it has made it necessary to believe 
in electricity and bacteria! Now, let a man 
attempt to regain his faith in the gods of Rome, 
or Fawns and Satyrs of Ancient Greece. He 
cannot ! The will has no power in this domain. 
He may want to. It may seem to him that 
such a life of constant intercourse with the 
spirits that haunted the woods and fountains 
of ancient Hellas, would be the sweetest and 
most desirable in the world. But he cannot 
live it ! He cannot by any, even the most pro- 
tracted or violent effort of his free choice, com- 
pel his disbelieving mind to cherish those im- 
possible faiths. 

Now, this will serve to indicate to you that 
when I say that a man can believe in the Chris- 
tian religion if he wishes to, I do not ignore 
the essential laws of thought, and, if it could 
be shown that the doctrines of Christianity be- 
longed to any or all of the same classes of ideas 
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Hits and Misses 



as those which have now been passed in review, 
I should be compelled to admit, that if some 
scientific evidence had affected them as it has 
affected the myths of ancient Greece, and you 
had thus lost your faith — it would be irrational 
and foolish to tell you that you could believe 
them again if you wanted to. 

But I wish to point out to you that these 
essential doctrines of Christianity relate to facts 
and questions lying in a domain so different 
that the mind is compelled to deal with them 
by a different set of faculties altogether. 

It is plain then, that there are realms of 
thought where the mind has no freedom to 
choose its beliefs, but has them forced upon it 
irresistibly. And it is equally plain that it is 
only in the realms where absolute knowledge is 
impossible, that any true freedom as to belief 
exists. What we know we must believe. Con- 
cerning that about which we only conjecture, 
we may believe what we choose. 

Have you ever seen an ant caught upon a 
leaf which has floated out into a lake? And 
have you watched it dart from one side to 
another, reaching the edge and looking out 
upon that boundless expanse of void and 
illimitable waters? So the soul darts back 
and forth across the little island of the known 



178 



He Can Believe, Who Will Believe 

facts of life and looks over into the profound 
abysses of the infinite and unknown. 

What lies upon its island it has no choice 
about believing. But concerning what lies over 
the edge, it dreams and hopes and exercises 
faith ! In that realm it exercises choice. Every 
man in reality does believe, that which he pre- 
fers to believe — about the unknown elements of 
life. 

I say then that the objects upon which you 
declare you cannot now fix your faith, lie in a 
domain which science has never yet touched ! 
Thev have tl us far remained incapable of either 
absolute proof or disproof. They have so 
lurked in the sacred shadows that the most 
which we have ever succeeded in doing so far 
as any scientific and experimental knowledge 
is concerned, is to point out an almost equally 
balanced group of evidences for and against 
them. 

What I now affirm then, is this — a man 
standing between these opposing and contradic- 
tory masses of evidence, is free (inviolably 
free) to choose the side which his heart, his 
hope, his aspiration prompt him to ! 

To set this fact before you in a light as clear 
as that of day, will be my effort now. 

i. The first great fundamental object in 
which I affirm that you may re-establish your 
179 



Hits and Misses 



lost faith if you wish to, is the existence 
of your soul. I affirm that its existence is 
not to be proven or disproven in the same way 
as any of these other objects of knowledge or 
at least not with the same sort of demonstrative 
and irresistible evidence. 

You cannot touch, taste or handle your soul. 
If you know it by intuition (as I believe you 
do) you cannot test your intuition by experi- 
ment as you can prove that two bodies cannot 
occupy the same space at the same time. 

Nor can you demonstrate its existence or its 
non-existence by logical svllogisms, nor by 
acids in a laboratory ! 

The proofs and disproofs are all drawn from 
a realm of either abstract reasoning or unveri- 
fiable intuitions, and in all ages of the world 
have been arrayed against each other in masses 
so nearly equal that the minds of men have 
oscillated between them like a pendulum. 

One thing at least is certain, and nothing is 
more certain ! It is that the existence and im- 
mortality of the soul has never been disproven ! 
By what evidence could it be? Show us your 
disproof, if you can! Demonstrate. You 
may persuade one man, a few men, many men ! 
But I ask for demonstration! By the nature of 
the case, demonstration is impossible. Science 
so far, has never transcended the domain of the 
180 



He Can Believe, Who Will Believe 



material, and by the supposition, spirit is imma- 
terial ! You will as soon prove that there is no 
such thing as gas, because gas is not a solid, as 
that there is no such thing as soul, because soul 
is not matter I 

We have disproven witches and fairies, be- 
cause men said they were objects of ocular 
vision. But who says the soul is? We say it 
is not I And so it belongs to a different realm. 

I ask you therefore whether you cannot be- 
lieve in it if you want to? What hinders you? 
Not proof. Not demonstration! You are 
therefore free to choose between these two 
opposing views. And if you ever do decide, it 
must be because you do choose. Forced you 
cannot be. I can be forced to disbelieve in 
fairies, but I would like to see you force me 
to disbelieve in my soul ! You may mass all 
your serried ranks of skeptics behind all libra- 
ries and laboratories on the two hemispheres 
and I will not budge an inch, because you can- 
not furnish proof ! And so because I want to 
believe I will believe! 

2. The second great fundamental object in 
which I say that you can believe if you want to, 
is a personal God a loving Heavenly Father? 
What, I ask you, has made it impossible for you 
to believe in Him if you wish to? Who has 
disproven his existence ? I do not ask you who 
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Hits and Misses 



asserted his non-existence. I know who that 
was. He lived many centuries ago, has never 
died, is living yet, his name is Fool! And 
every man who says there is no God, is, by the 
very necessity of the case, a Fool ! for he asserts 
a universal negative! How does he know 
there is no God ? He may have traversed the 
milky way on foot or have taken the wings 
of the morning and flown to the uttermost parts 
of space, and when his wings have melted in 
some last central sun, and head and heart failed 
him, he may have just then touched the outer 
hem of His garment! Prove that there is no 
God! You have no proof. I can believe in 
Him if I want to. I do. I will. 

3. In the third place, I instance Providence 
and prayer. If you want to believe in them 
why do you not? Who has proven that there 
is no Providence and that prayer does not 
avail? I may not prove there is and that it 
does. But my inability to prove the affirmative 
is not your ability to prove the negative ! If I 
want to believe that there is an ear that hears 
my prayer and a hand that guides my wander- 
ing feet, you can no more prove to me that they 
do not, than you can prove that a mother does 
not receive a telepathic message from a dying 
boy, or that when she has died, she does not 
hover round her child ! 

182 



He Can Believe, Who Will Believe 

4. In the fourth place, there is no impossi- 
bility of your believing in the incarnation of 
God in Christ. And here we must take care! 
We must divide this subject to conquer it. 
The problem of belief in Jesus Christ as a man 
and a God must be clearly differentiated. 
There is no more doubt in any one's mind who 
has any capacity to judge, that Jesus Christ 
lived the holy life and died the sacred death 
which he is said to have lived and died than 
that the sun rises and sets. We believe it by 
an inviolable necessity. We could not with- 
hold our credence from this fact if we should 
try. The stones would cry out against us ! 

But you enter- another domain when you ask 
whether his nature was that of a God ! Here 
we pass beyond the possibility of demonstrative 
evidence at a single bound! Prophecy can 
make it credible, and it has, but cannot demon- 
strate it. Miracles may render it probable, and 
they do, but cannot prove it. The belief of his 
friends may lend it the highest likelihood. 
His own wonderful self-consciousness may lift 
that likelihood many degrees toward moral cer- 
tainty ; but still, still, we are moving in a domain 
where scientific evidence cannot touch the heart 
of the mysterv. If a skeptic asserts that 
prophecies might have been coincidences, 
miracles might have been the result of human 
183 



Hits and Misses 



knowledge raised to a higher power — friends 
might be deceived and even the clear self-con- 
sciousness of Jesus a delusion — where will you 
go for disproof? If all these evidences rolled 
together do not demonstrate (and they never 
have), then demonstration appears to be im- 
possible. 

The evidence for and against the divinity of 
Jesus masses itself up on each side of the soul 
like great cliffs full of magnetic power, and the 
soul drawn by one and then the other vibrates 
and fluctuates between them. 

There, in those terrible oscillations of uncer- 
tainty, as I fled from one to the other of those 
piles of argument which had been accumulated 
during the ages, the conviction came clear 
enough to me, that neither would irresistibly 
draw me to itself, and that I must deliberately 
choose between them! I could see as clear 
as daylight, that whichever one I chose, I 
could find arguments enough to sustain me! 
But that if I waited to be irresistibly impelled 
to one or other, I should wait until death stole 
up and closed my eyes — and so, I chose ! And 
nothing in the nature of the evidence against 
the claims of Jesus made it impossible for me to 
choose ! It has never been disproven that Jesus 
was the Son of God ! How can it be ? It 
might be rendered very improbable; but how 
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He Can Believe, Who Will Believe 



could it be made certain? What kind of evi- 
dence would do it ? Every human being in the 
world might come to a unanimous and undi- 
vided decision that he was only a man — and yet 
be wrong. The whole world stood out against 
Galilleo and yet the astronomer was right ! 

My friend, it is not here that the obstacle to 
your faith is to be found ! You say that you 
cannot believe if you try. Well, at least, the 
impossibility does not lie in the evidence. But 
if it does not lie in the evidence — then you are 
free to believe it if you will! And that is what 
I said at the outset ! I said there was nothing 
to prevent your recovering your faith if you 
really want to. And is it not right here that 
you are under a strong delusion and a lie? 
When you do not succeed in "believing," you 
think that science has put forth evidences that 
make faith impossible, while in reality the diffi- 
culty is not in the credibility of the doctrines, 
but in some inertia and indifference in the mind 
which examines them ! 

This is a vastly different thing. 

Let me illustrate these different relationships 
of the soul moving without volition toward 
irresistible evidence, and oscillating freely be- 
tween opposingly attractive ideas. 

Two steel castles stand on opposite sides of 
an artificial lake. A little iron vessel floats 
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Hits and Misses 



between them, and suddenly turns and swims 
toward the castle which is charged with an 
irresistible magnetic force. 

This is the mind of man swayed beyond its 
own control by demonstrable truth. 

But the soul moving freely and independ- 
ently between the realms of atheism, skeptic- 
ism, materialism, and those of God and Christ 
and immortality and Providence, free to attach 
itself to whichever it prefers, is the humming- 
bird moving upon unfettered wings between a 
honeysuckle and a deadly upas tree ! 

If the arguments for Christianity were so 
irresistible that the soul would be forced to 
accept one side or the other by the same sort of 
necessity that it is forced to believe that twice 
two are four — there would be no test or proba- 
tion of the soul. 

The question is an open one, and we are told 
to choose. And what I affirm is, that men are 
not kept from accepting Christianity because it 
is intrinsically improbable, but because their 
souls are filled with so much weakness and 
worldliness, that when they come to try to 
attach themselves to these sublime faiths, they 
have not the grip to hold on ! Of course you 
would believe if you could not help it. The 
point is, to believe when you can help it. 

The difficulty then is not in the weakness of 
186 



He Can Believe, Who Will Believe 

the evidence, but the weakness of the soul itself. 
There is proof enough to satisfy the soul that 
chooses to accept it. It is upon this point that 
I insist. We have lost soul power to cling to 
the true, the beautiful, and the good, and we 
say that the true, the beautiful, and the good 
have lost power to hold us! It is a delusion as 
old and as subtle as life itself. We lose our 
relish for food, and accuse it of losing its taste. 
We lose our sensitiveness to sound, and to 
color, and accuse them of losing their charm. 
We become cynical and sour and accuse men of 
losing their integrity and honor. We relax our 
moral principles and accuse virtue and honor 
of losing their majesty. We permit the hope 
and joy of our souls to die within us, and 
accuse the world of permitting its glory to pass 
away. 

The hand relaxes its hold on the rope and 
accuses the anchor of losing its grip on the 
bottom ! 

In exactly the same way, too many of us have 
permitted the fascinations or the sorrows of life 
to dim our spiritual sight, to dull our spiritual 
hearing, and then blamed the other world for 
losing its reality and its power. The soul has 
not lost the evidence of its own existence, but 
we have lost our sensitiveness to that evidence. 
God does not shine less clearly, but we have 
187 



Hits and Misses 



permitted our eyes to be closed. Providence 
and prayer are as real and available, but we 
have grown unobservant and untrustful! 
Jesus Christ stands out before the world in all 
his pristine splendor and divinity, but our hearts 
have lost their throb and our spirits their 
hunger ! The sun has not disappeared from the 
heaven ! The eye has suffered an eclipse ! 

If we really want to believe in the objects of 
our faith, they are all within our reach to-day. 
They have not altered! What we need (and 
only need) is the passion in our souls to attach 
ourselves to them ! Everywhere multitudes 
are letting go their hold on all that is worth 
clinging to ; but while they throw up their weak 
hands and go down into the vast deeps of de- 
spair and sin, here and there some brave soul 
hangs on ! The whole race may abandon God, 
but Noah will cling to him until the floods 
have come and gone. All Sodom may let go, 
but Lot never! What difference did it make 
to Daniel that other men thought that Jehovah 
had expired in the heavens above the sacked 
Jerusalem. He never lost his faith! Not 
another soul on the hill of sacrifice felt the pres- 
ence of the eternal God save Elijah, but he 
felt him ! To the stupid masses in Jerusalem 
the spiritual had ceased to be real, but not for 



1 88 



He Can Believe, Who Will Believe 

Jesus Christ! What they saw nowhere he 
beheld everywhere! 

It is right here, my friends, that there slowly 
unfolds to us the guilty secret of our unfaith. 
Our souls themselves have lost their love and 
aspiration, and not as we vainly and sinfully 
delude ourselves, the Christian religion its 
vitality and its evidence! If it had, I would 
not reproach you! But it has not! Those 
sublime truths have lost none of their rol- 
ling and resounding sweetness. Christ has 
parted with no whit of that divinity which 
kindled in the souls of the Apostles and 
the martyrs that passion of love and devotion. 
Instead of losing its attractive power — like a 
magnet recruiting its stores from some invisible 
source — this sublime doctrine has steadily 
grown more seductive and entrancing to all 
whose souls were ready to receive it. 

Do not solace yourself by saying that it is no 
longer credible ! It is you who are no longer 
receptive ! Your soul has lost its tenderness, 
its aspiration, its desire. You could believe if 
you wanted to. But you do no t! 

To me, with every passing year this indiffer- 
ence to God seems more terrible ! I see more 
and more clearly what tragedies lie in store for 
souls that do not love the light and feed upon 
the bread of God ! Each new experience of the 
1 89 



Hits and Misses 



power of the soul to part with its capacities, and 
to suffer the atrophy of its sublime organs, fills 
me with a new horror. Who knows at what 
moment and in what critical experiences it will 
pass a line beyond which it can never recover 
its lost capacity. Suppose that this deadly 
wasting away of your power to believe in and 
appropriate the spiritual should be consum- 
mated to-day! And that after this morning 
hour, you should have passed a line which 
terminated your capability of being developed 
into a seraph or some higher form of life ! 

Does that seem preposterous? 

Then come with me and open the top of this 
bee hive. In those cells are the embryos of 
the future generations of bees. There is 
absolutely no difference whatever between the 
eggs from which the workers and the queens 
are produced. You may select any two of 
them and it will be a matter of indifference 
which you name for the Empress of this tiny 
realm. It is all a question of environment and 
nutrition. In order to develop a queen, the 
workers remove the partitions of the adjoining 
cells, surround the larva by more extended ones, 
and feed it an abundance of rich food called 
royal jelly ! The die is cast ! Out of the po- 
tential embryo royalty has emerged. But the 
period in which this queenly potentiality exists 
190 



He Can Believe, Who Will Believe 

is a limited one ! There comes a critical hour, 
after which the larva is hopelessly and forever 
a worker! Nothing can alter its destiny now! 
Sun, moon, stars, flowers, a colony of 4,000,000 
bees, all toil in vain. The deadly line of pro- 
bation has been crossed. 

And it was all a question of nourishment — 
of royal food ! Who knows but it is so with 
us ? Who knows but there is a fatal hour, and 
after it an impossibility of change. Are the 
functions and capacities of a man any less deli- 
cately adjusted, think you, than those of a 
honey bee ? Who of us can measure the critical 
nature of this experience through which we are 
passing? If these souls of ours may be thus 
nournished by truth and love and hope, if there 
may be some delicate and subtle transmutation 
dependent upon the food we take, then I for one 
cry out, Oh, God, enlarge my cell and feed me 
with the bread of life ! 

I do not exaggerate the seriousness of life S 
I have no power to put it up before you in a 
thousandth part of its gravity! There is a 
warning word that gleams through every page 
of scripture and rings through every tragedy of 
human life, "Too late/' "Too late!" 

We know not all it means. Its entire sig- 
nificance is not disclosed ; but he is no alarmist 
who resolutely tells a company of pilgrims who 
191 



Hits and Misses 



pause a while to hear the message of his heart, 
"You may not trifle with your souls!" And 
I declare to you to-day, that if you find your 
faith slipping away from you — you must get it 
back ! You must not and cannot live without 
it. The soul is just as real, God is just as 
real, Providence and prayer are just as real, 
and Jesus Christ is just as real as when John 
and Paul and Luther and Knox and Edwards 
grasped them in the arms of faith. You, too, 
can believe. You are as free as they! You 
are no different from the man in our story 
text, except that he was desperately in earnest. 
If you were as in earnest as he, there would be 
no trouble. Lord, I believe, he cried, help 
thou my unbelief. God did help. God will 
help. He always opens to those who knock 
and he is always found of him who seeks ! 



192 



Temple Building, a Universal Instinct 



"The groves were God's -first temples. Ere man 
learned 

To hew the shaft, and lay the architrave, 

And spread the roof above them — ere he framed 

The lofty vault to gather and roll back 

The sound of anthems; in the darkling wood, 

Amidst the cool and silence, he knelt down 

And offered to the Mightiest solemn thanks 

And supplication." 

— Bryant. 

"God is not to be worshiped with sacrifices and 
blood: for what pleasure can He have in the slaughter 
of the innocent? but with a pure mind, a good and 
honest purpose. Temples are not to be built for Him 
with stones piled on high. God is to be consecrated 
in the breast of each." 

— Seneca. 

"One thing have I desired of the Lord, that will I 
seek after: that I may dwell in the house of the 
Lord all the days of my life, to behold the beauty of 
the Lord and to inquire in His temple." 

— Psalm. 



Address at dedication of the Avondale Pres- 
byterian Church, October 2, 1898: 

It is as much the obligation of a human 
organization as of a human organism, to reflect 
upon its deeds. 

Now that we have with much expenditure of 
effort, of money, and of devotion erected this 
beautiful building, it will be becoming in us to 
inquire whether what we have done can be 
justified at the bar of reason, or is only one 
more mysterious act in that endless train of 
inexplicable operations which are prompted by 
the restlessness, the vanity, the ignorance, or 
the superstition of man. 

In building this sacred edifice (which we are 
now to dedicate to the worship of that divine 
being of whose nature Jesus Christ has given 
us the fullest revelation ) , I shall argue that we 
have obeyed a natural and irrepressible instinct 
of the human soul, and are therefore justified 
in our toil and self-denial. 

And because I wish to make this argument 
irrefragible and convincing, I will base it upon 
the following proposition : 
195 



Hits and Misses 



Whatever men in all or almost all ages and 
places and circumstances have been accustomed 
to do, possesses a certain sacredness, and would 
appear to be prompted by some indestructible 
necessity of their very nature. Their deeds 
may have been coarse, vulgar, and even wicked ; 
but this would seem to prove that a good in- 
stinct had been corrupted and perverted rather 
than that they had been trying to give expres- 
sion to a feeling and a desire which were bad in 
themselves. 

If in almost all ages, places, and circum- 
stances then, there has been some power operat- 
ing upon the minds of men which has impelled 
them to rear altars and shrines and temples — 
it would seem as safe to infer that it was as 
much an integral part of their nature to do this 
(and that if it were rightly done it were well 
done), as to infer that because everywhere and 
in all ages beavers have built dams, birds nests, 
bees honey-combs, and coral insects islands, 
it was a proper and holy function of their 
natures so to do. * 

And so the golden thread that will run 
through the warp and woof of this discourse 
will be the idea, that it is as much a function 
of man to build temples, as of the spider to 
weave a web, or the worm a cocoon — and that 
as he always has done it, he always will do it, 
196 



Temple Building, a Universal Instinct 

and that in his performance of this act he is 
consciously or unconsciously fulfilling one of 
the ends of his being. 

If there is, then, something sacred and 
beautiful in what the birds are doing in trees 
and insects in the ground or air, there is some- 
thing unspeakably more beautiful in what every 
colony of men, women, and children do, when, 
prompted by this divine and holy impulse, they 
gather together the crude materials that lie 
strewn about them, carve, decorate, and polish 
them, and with their transforming touch make 
them "suffer a sea change into' that something 
new and strange," — a graceful and beautiful 
temple of worship. 

And so if there has entered this portal some 
proud man, whose mission it is to scoff, let him 
go forth into the open air and scoff at those tiny 
architects who in earth and air and sea, are 
obeying the summons of that divine Being who 
has called them into life, and are decorating the 
world with those delicate and beautiful struc- 
tures which it is their mission to create and 
ours to admire. 

Come, then ! Stand here upon this vantage 

ground, and let me with the wand of history 

summon the generations of the dead back from 

their eternal repose, to the structural activities 

of their busy lives. Look thou, on them ! 
197 



Hits and Misses 



It is a proof that the aboriginal tribes of our 
own native land had never attained a high state 
of culture or advancement, that they are ex- 
ceptions to this almost universal law, and have 
not left behind them the ruin of an altar or a 
temple, unless the rude mounds of our Ohio 
V alley may be such. 

But to the south of us — in lands more fertile, 
beneath skies more blue and in an environment 
where life was stimulated to more rapid devel- 
opment — the more refined and cultivated Mexi- 
cans erected temples whose ruins still fill the 
mind of the beholder with wonder. 

When Cortez and his companions wandered 
about the City of Mexico under the leadership 
of their native guides, they took their way 
from the bustling scenes of the market place 
to the great Trocalli. It occupied the spot 
which probably had been consecrated to the 
gods from the foundation of the city, but the 
enormous structure which loomed before their 
astonished eves had been completed in i486. 

It was a work of rude but sincere art. It 
was imposing. It was awe inspiring. It rose 
in pyramidal form to a vast height. It was 
inhabited (or rather haunted) by ferocious and 
terrible priests, whose hands were busily plying 
the axes with which they sacrificed their hu- 
man victims — hundreds of thousands of whose 
198 



Temple Building, a Universal Instinct 

skulls were piled in heaps in sacred chambers. 
Their ritual was somber, their music grotesque 
and horrible ; but all was in keeping with the 
awfulness of the sanctuary itself. 

It might seem at first that it would be safe 
to argue that every instinct which could prompt 
such bloody and such brutal deeds was evil, and 
should be exterminated. But a more chaste and 
sober reflection has taught us that no instinct 
can be uprooted; but must be educated and 
developed. It was not that the instinct of wor- 
ship was wrong, but that it found a wrong 
expression! And so their human slaughters 
in their temple do not throw any genuine sus- 
picion upon that holiness of the original instinct 
which built the temple ; but only demonstrates 
that it needed a perfect evolution. It was still 
an instinct, and in obeying it they yielded to a 
power which has been resistlessly impelling 
men to perform this sacred function in every 
age of recorded history. 

And this same impulse took possession of 
a multitude of savages in England long cen- 
turies before that country was known to the 
Romans. It drove them out upon Salisbury 
Plain, two miles from Amesbury, in Wiltshire, 
and there, with songs and incantations, they 
erected a structure so strange and weird as still 
to attract the feet of pilgrims. 

199 



Hits and Misses 



Reconstruct, if you can, with the aid of your 
imagination, the scene in which the hordes of 
semi-civilized beings, who adored the supreme 
Power which they saw manifested in primeval 
forests, foaming oceans and heavens ablaze 
with lightning, marched around this temple of 
Stonehenge to rude music and resounding 
hymns — and remember that it was as much 
an instinct for them to do this, as for the wild 
beasts to seek their food in forests, or the eagles 
to build their nests upon a crag. 

It was this same instinct in the hearts of the 
men of that great race which issued from the 
rich earth in the valley of the Nile when, cen- 
turies before recorded history, they erected 
those temples, the sublimest type of which is to 
be found in ruins on the banks of the Nile, on 
the site of ancient Thebes. 

It created similar forms of architecture in 
Asia. In ancient Babylon hundreds of thou- 
sands of men labored to erect that vast pile, 
upon the top of which the priests worshiped 
and the astronomers watched the stars ; and in 
India the pilgrim uncovers his head in awe at 
the labor and the devotion which carved the 
temple of Ellera from a single isolated rock, 
creating thus a building as large as the Royal 
Exchange, in London — a magnificent jewel in 
stone. 

200 



Temple Building, a Universal Instinct 

It came like a divine madness upon the 
ancient Jews. At the call of their great King — 
without the sound of hammer or of axe, their 
quiet hands patiently and reverently fitted to- 
gether that material which had been shaped in 
far-away quarries, foundries and shops, into a 
building whose memory still haunts the world 
like a half-forgotten dream. 

Nothing is more astonishing than the variety 
of the creations of this sacred impulse. As 
life (that eternal mystery) clothes itself in va- 
rious forms in the diverse regions of the earth 
— the palm, the oak, the pine, the rhinoceros, 
the lion, and the gazelle — so this all-animating 
impulse selected forms suitable to the different 
characteristics of the worshipers. Some of 
them have been horrible and ugly beyond the 
power of language to describe ; but on the 
Acropolis of iVthens, it animated its devotees 
to construct a building, whose perfect propor- 
tions have corrected the standards of taste and 
the canons of beauty for more than twenty cen- 
turies. 

A few generations later, this chaste genius of 
architecture revisited the world again, and on 
the site of the Church of St. Sophia, which had 
been erected by Constantine, and which was 
destroyed in 532, Justinian summoned Anthe- 
mius de Fralles and Isidore de Milet to do for 
201 



Hits and Misses 



Constantinople what had been done for Athens. 
Not only were the mines and the forests com- 
pelled to furnish raw material, but the temples 
of Ephesus, Palmyra, Pergamos and countless 
other cities were despoiled of their columns and 
their treasures to make it beautiful and sublime. 

"Solomon, I have surpassed thee!" cried the 
enraptured Emperor, when it was done, and 
thus gave expression to that human pride which 
has mingled itself with the pure devotion of all 
the builders of these sacred edifices. 

Not only the Jew and the Christian, but the 
fierce and relentless Mohammedans, felt the 
inward motions of this constructive impulse. 

Consolidated from the fierce tribes of the 
desert, and animated by the majestic spirit of 
Mohammed, the Mussulmans, in their turn, 
sowed their sacred mosques broadcast over 
Europe, Asia, and Africa. But their devotion 
culminated not in an original structure. They 
adopted, altered and reconstructed St. Sophia, 
and it stands to-day as their testimony that 
they, too, have been animated by a mysterious 
and irresistible emotion, which has compelled 
them to build or to dedicate a building where 
men might worship God. 

But never in the history of humanity did this 
instinct reveal itself so powerfully as in the 
Middle Ages. 

202 



Temple Building, a Universal Instinct 

To give expression to a feeling is to realize 
it (make it real), and as matter is the language 
of the spirit, it is the medium of its realization. 
Thoughts float idly across the mind till they 
have been precipitated in print, painted on can- 
vas, carved in marble, or cemented in stone. 

And so they built "those everlasting piles, 

Types of the spiritual church which God hath reared." 

Stone in them seems to lose its stubborn na- 
ture as it soars, in obedience to the infinite as- 
piration of the soul. They are the world's most 
striking instance of the spirit's power to sub- 
due matter, since it is matter of the most 
obstinate, solid, concrete kind. 

There are two ways in which we can form 
some vital and vivid conception of the might 
and majesty of the operation of this instinct 
for sacred architecture in this wonderful epoch. 

A. In the first place, by reflecting upon the 
wide extent of territory and the immeasurable 
masses of material in which it operated. 

The whole known Occidental, and not a little 
of the Oriental world, was dotted with the 
products of the constructive genius of that 
wonderful era. Seen from the upper air, these 
constellations of temples would resemble the 
constellations of the stars as seen from the 
earth. 



203 



Hits and Misses 



The citizens of every great metropolis were 
seized by an ungovernable impulse to express 
their religious feeling in imperishable stone. 
Great provinces were called upon by Bishops 
for offerings, and a willing and eager people 
poured out their money like water. 

Their ardor and enthusiasm were never sur- 
passed and probably never equaled in any spirit- 
ual movement. The visions of those structures 
which they were to erect floated before their 
minds in enticing beauty. Millions of the com- 
monest people, incapable ordinarily of cherish- 
ing large and lofty conceptions, became the 
almost passive instruments of a sublime ardor. 
The rich gave of their wealth and the poor of 
their poverty. Artists spent the best years of 
their lives in working out their ideals on can- 
vas, in wood, or in marble. Workmen became 
absorbed in their toil and swallowed up in the 
immensity of their task. The lords and ladies 
of high degree permitted themselves to be har- 
nessed like beasts of burden by the side of 
artisans and beggars, to trucks upon which 
great stones were loaded, and hauled them over 
country roads and through city streets to the 
accompaniment of sacred songs and harps and 
cymbals. 

These edifices were centuries in process of 
erection. The architects who planned them 
204 



Temple Building, a Universal Instinct 

died and gave place to successors. The gener- 
ation which began them passed away, some- 
times before their foundations were fully laid. 
The next reared the superstructure, but never 
saw the roof or tower. The third, or fourth, 
or fifth, following in their footsteps and inher- 
iting their enthusiasm, laid the capstone with 
rejoicing. 

The mind of the student of this tremendous 
movement of religious ardor is stupefied by 
its intensity, its beauty, its results. Passing 
through England and gazing upon St. Paul's, 
Westminster, Durham; entering France and 
contemplating Rouen, Chartres, Rheims, Notre 
Dame ; Germany, and trembling at the grand- 
eur of Cologne and Strasburgh, and Italy, to be 
dazed and bewildered by Pisa, Milan, Orvieto, 
Sienna, Florence, St. Mark's, and St. Paul's 
without the gates and St. Peter's within, and 
scores of other lesser lights, he feels that some 
awful power above, as real as that which lifts 
the tides, has lifted the thoughts, the aspirations 
and the hopes of men to heaven. Such an 
instinct, he feels, is rooted and grounded in the 
depths of human nature. Men have done these 
deeds because the central power of their being 
impelled them. Such labors are as true and 
necessary a function of the life of man as the 
clearing of forests, the transportation of articles 
205 



Hits and Misses 

of commerce, eating, sleeping, sowing, reaping. 
The emotive instinct may have been perverted. 
Its perversion may have led man to deeds of 
atrocity, but the instinct itself must be divine ! 

B. But there is another way in which its 
might and meaning may be detected and felt. 

It is by pausing before a single one of these 
majestic fabrics and studying it in detail. 
Choose which you may — be it Cologne, Milan, 
Rouen, or Rheims — a careful survey of the 
entire structure will leave upon the mind the 
same awe-struck impression which remained 
on that of Lowell before the Cathedral of 
Chartres, as, "following some fine instinct in 
his feet, and looking up suddenly, he found his 
eyes" — 

"Confronted with the minster's vast repose, 
Silent and gray as forest-leagured cliff 
Left inland bv the ocean's slow retreat, 
That hears afar the breeze-borne rote, and longs, 
Remembering shocks of surf that clomb and fell, 
Spume-sliding down the baffled decuman, 
It rose before me, patiently remote, 
From the great tides of life it breasted once, 
Hearing the noise of men as in a dream. 
I stood before the triple northern port, 
Where dedicated shapes of saints and kings, 
Stern faces bleared with immemorial watch, 
Looked down, benignly grave, and seemed to say : 
'Ye come and go incessant; we remain 
Safe in the hallowed quiets of the past. 
Be reverent, ye who Hit and are forgot, 
Of faith so nobly realised as this!' " 



206 



Temple Building, a Universal Instinct 

Nobly indeed ! Made real indeed ! As the 
poet "followed some fine instinct in his feet," 
and looked up suddenly — those mighty builders 
followed some fine instinct in their hearts and 
built up lof tily and mightily in everlasting stone 
the deep emotions of their souls ! 

If there were only one such building in the 
world, the student of the life of man might not 
pause in his search for the solution of the 
mysteries of this, his marvelous being, until he 
had found what potent inward motion of his 
spirit had put it forth. 

But, as we have already seen, it is universal — 
not unique. The erection of these edifices is 
confined neither to localities, nations, nor 
epochs. It is as invariably a function of hu- 
man life as plowing, and reaping, and spinning, 
and weaving. 

We must permit our eyes to roam over the 
whole wide world to grasp the full sweep of 
its operations. We must recall the mosques 
of the Mohammedans, the temples of the Hin- 
dus and the pagodas of the Chinese — the ter- 
rible Jumna Marjed — Juggernaut — the porce- 
lain tower of Nankin — and the thousands upon 
thousands of smaller reproductions of their 
grandeur and their glory scattered over those 
mysterious regions. 

Nor is this phenomenon an evanescent phase 
207 



Hits and Misses 



of rudimentary instincts and vanishing- emo- 
tions, whose manifestations are confined alone 
to the ancient and medieval world. The last 
born race and its last born generation has 
come into being impregnated by this divine 
aspiration to construct temples in which to 
worship God ! The virus (if virus it be) burns 
as hotly in its veins as in those of any who have 
wandered beneath the stars in wonder and 
looked out upon infinity in awe. 

It may be that the operation of this instinct 
in this new land of America is not calculated 
to impress the imagination so much by the 
grandeur and sublimity of its architectural ex- 
pression, but it does so even more by the power 
of its moral sentiment. 

Never from the beginning of our history has 
a colony of these mysterious ephemera which 
we call men swarmed from the old hive into 
a new one, be it upon seacoast, prairie or moun- 
tain summit, but with swift and indefatigable 
instinct these tiny workers have reared a tem- 
ple at the same time when they builded a fire- 
side, a trading place and a schoolhouse ! Noth- 
ing can prevent this action — nothing interfere 
with the performance of this function! As 
certainly as the sun germinates the seed they 
sow in the furrows and constructs the graceful 
forms of wheat and corn and vine, the divine 
208 



Temple Building, a Universal Instinct 

Power that broods upon their souls compels 
them to rear over their heads the roof of a 
sanctuary in which they may safely and rev- 
erently bend before the great All Father. 

Infidels and atheists may scoff at this in- 
stinct and prophesy its disappearance, but they 
can not explain it and they can not destroy it. 

A quarter of a century or so ago Robert 
Ingersoll, addressing an audience of skeptics in 
the little village of Watkins, ventured the as- 
sertion that the course of the Christian religion 
was nearly run, and that it no longer possessed 
the vitality to propagate itself. His words 
were transported across the continent to Chap- 
lain McCabe, who telegraphed him : "Go on 
with your scoffing. We are building a 
Methodist church every day in the year !" 

They are building more now! And every 
little community and every great aggregation, 
is still imbued with this structural spirit, and 
still animated by this architectural impulse. 
Nothing is more certain than that America is 
to be a land of churches ! 

When you stop the birds building nests, the 
beavers dams, the coral insects islands, and men 
and women homes to shelter their own heads 
and protect the tender forms of their offspring, 
you may hope to have them cease the erection 
of temples for the worship of God. 

209 



* Hits and Misses 

Awed by this mystery of our being, we recall 
the memorable words of Plutarch which the 
lapse of ages has proven to be not only history 
but prophecy, that men traveling on the earth 
might "find towns and cities without walls, 
without letters, without kings, without houses, 
without wealth, money, theaters, gymnasia, 
while nowhere had been seen or would be, any 
city without temples and Gods, without pray- 
ers, divinations and sacrifices," and that "a city 
might sooner be built without ground on which 
to fix it, than a community to be constituted 
void of religion, or being so constituted be 
preserved." 

We have now pursued the channel of our 
thought to that sacred spot where the stream of 
reason mingles itself with the ocean of rever- 
ence and adoration. For there is always a 
place at last where we encounter the insoluble 
mysteries of being, and nothing remains for 
us but to prostrate ourselves before the Creator 
in our ignorance and love. 

We may trace this instinct through its mar- 
velous revelations of itself in shrines and tem- 
ples, to its fountain spring in the soul of man. 
But when we arrive at this point we can go no 
farther. It was God who made this spring to 
flow ! It is He who implanted the instinct of 



2IO 



Temple Building, a Universal Instinct 

worship and of temple building. We build 
and worship — for we must. 

Be it ours to eradicate the evil from this in- 
stinct if we can ! Let us cast out all supersti- 
tion and unreason ! Here let us rejoice and be 
glad that there have been no horrid incanta- 
tions over this temple, that no human victims 
have been offered nor animal sacrifices been 
slain! But if there be in any human heart a 
thought unworthy of its God and of this place, 
let us drive it out, and all be pure and holy here, 
as father and mother and little children are 
pure around the hearthstone, and the angels of 
God are pure around the great white throne. 



211 



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